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Purity and Impurity

The laws of purity and impurity were carefully set out in order to organize the Israelite camp around the Tabernacle and its holiness. This institutionalized an ecological-ethical system that related to various bodily situations. Yair Furstenberg investigates whether it is possible to separate our recoil from what we find disgusting and our tendency to classify it as inferior and describes the way in which physical revulsion is translated into an ethical hierarchy that shapes our view of the world

The laws of purity and impurity were carefully set out in order to organize the Israelite camp around the Tabernacle and its holiness. This institutionalized an ecological-ethical system that related to various bodily situations. Yair Furstenberg investigates whether it is possible to separate our recoil from what we find disgusting and our tendency to classify it as inferior and describes the way in which physical revulsion is translated into an ethical hierarchy that shapes our view of the world.
 
The history of the concept of "impurity" illustrates the development of Jewish ethical thinking from its inception. The leper, on whose body a nega has been found, is banished from the camp, his clothing unraveling and his hair disheveled and shouting "Impure! Impure!" Thus, the danger in touching the leper becomes all at once, somewhere outside the camp, a danger to society. The leper is ethically stained.
 
And what can be said of the status of a woman who regularly becomes a carrier of impurity that is discharged from her body? Can we make a distinction between our unease as a result of a particular bodily situation and the attribution of religious and ethical values to that situation? The development of the concept of “impurity”, which is located somewhere between disgust and revulsion on the one hand and accusation on the other, embodies the struggle with this fundamental problem. The book of Leviticus provides a list of animals that are considered to be impure and describes the bodily situations that make an individual impure. The camp is organized around the Tabernacle – the dwelling of God – and the exact mapping of the types of impurity is aimed exclusively at protecting its holiness and the presence of God. Since the impurity in the camp can defile the Tabernacle from a distance, an annual purification ceremony is required on Yom Kippur: “And so he will do for the Tent of Meeting that dwells with them in the midst of their impurity" (Leviticus 16:16). Therefore, that same physical impurity which is natural and unavoidable – the menstruating woman, the new mother, the dead and the zav – keeps God at a distance. It drives Him away.
 
This is an ecological system with pre-Biblical roots that relate to the struggle between cosmic and demonic forces. Traces of this can be seen in, for example, the banishing of the goat to Az’zel (whose divinity was made vague in the Masoretic text, in which it became Azazel) on Yom Kippur to the impurity that resides in the lower world. In this system, sins also constitute a danger in that they threaten the Temple and drive off the Divine Presence: “And you shall not defile the land which you shall inhabit, in which I dwell” (Numbers 35:34).
 
Lepers in the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem.
From “A Diary of my Life in the Holy Land” by Andrew Edward Breen, published in Rochester, New York in 1906.
 
Therefore, by means of a system of purity and impurity, a religious and ethical hierarchy is created based on the characteristics of the bodily situation and at the same time it is characterized using total opposites. This is a charged and powerful language whose usage expanded significantly during the Second Temple period. For Ezra and Nehemiah, non-Jews are physically impure (Ezra 9; Nehemiah 13:5-9). Thus, when Ezra banished the non-Jewish wives, he was drawing a line between pure and impure. The Yahad community in Qumran had a similar approach, except that in their eyes anyone outside their community was condemned to be impure. Anyone under the Bli’el regime – the Sons of Darkness – is contaminated with impurity: “He will not receive atonement and will not be purified by the menstrual waters and will not be made holy by seas and rivers and will not be purified through bathing; impure, impure he will remain as long as he does not accept the laws of God and does not follow his teachings” (Community Rule 3:25-26). The tendency to attribute impurity to another in order to draw social and geographic boundaries (the Diaspora even became impure during the Second Temple period) became so dominant that even the Pharisees separated themselves from the impurity of the common people who in their view could not purify themselves.
 
However, there were alternatives that undermined the power of impurity to create moral distinctions between people. Just prior to Christianity becoming a religion without national boundaries and without any moral distinction between the circumcised and uncircumcised, Peter the apostle, on his entry into the home of Cornelius, the Roman centurion, declared: “You understand that it is unlawful for Jews to enter the house of non-Jews; yet God has told me not to call anyone, since he is a man, impure or repulsive.“ (Acts 10:28) Thus, Peter rejected one of the foundations of the religious language of his day, which organized the world by differentiating between pure and impure.
 
On the other hand, and without diminishing the revulsion related to impurity, another approach appeared that placed the system of impurity on a different footing. The edicts of Antiochus required the Jews to defile the Temple with idol worship and to defile their bodies by eating impure foods. The Book of the Macabees emphasizes that many gave their lives – not for the purity of the Temple but rather in order not to defile their bodies.
 
In this way, another way of thinking about impurity became prevalent. This approach shifted the moral focus of impurity laws from preserving the ecological system that surrounds the Temple or the camp to preserving the purity of the individual. The new approach thus enabled the Tanaitic literature to continue the development of the laws of purity and impurity and the value of not eating impure foods even after the destruction of the Temple, a period in which the differentiation between pure and impure had lost its influence in the public and political sphere. Avoiding impurity allowed the Sages to maintain their quality of life and it determined their behavior among impure people and within the public domain, in which contact with impurity threatened from every side.
 
And there are those who sought to make the language of purity and impurity unnecessary. In their eyes, these laws had become a means to fulfill the decree of God and signified nothing else. According to a post-Talmudic source, Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakai said to his pupils: “It is not the dead that defile and it is not water that purifies but rather it is an edict of God. God said: I have created my laws and my decrees and you may not violate my decree” (Pesikta Derav Kahana 4,7). The believer is left simply to submit to the word of God and to commit himself to following his command.
 
It seems that such an approach, which is brought in the name of Yohanan Ben Zakai, ignores the ethical weight of the feelings of revulsion and comfort, of impurity and purity, and the place they occupy in the organization of our view of the world and its design.
 
Dr. Yair Furstenberg, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, has a PhD in Talmud from Hebrew University and is currently at Princeton University.

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