Introduction: Two Ancient Views on Ritual Purity and Impurity

IN ONE OF ITS SENSES, as we have just seen, the term ‘holiness’ stands in opposition to ritual impurity. Biblical and rabbinic texts, when taken together, seem to allow for a wide variety of approaches to the meaning of ritual purity and impurity (toharah and tumah). Here I want to focus on two such approaches, arguing that Maimonides was familiar with them both and that he adopted one and consciously rejected the other. His position on this matter is another expression of the sort of religious sensibility he sought to inculcate in his readers, and in addition teaches us about the sort of religious sensibility against which he sought to inoculate them.

Maimonides made a conscious choice between two competing views of the nature of ritual purity and impurity, accepting one and rejecting the other. What are these two views? They are well captured by a pair of texts. Heikhalot rabati reports that the students of Rabbi Nehuniah ben Hakanah wished to recall him from what appears to have been a mystical experience without endangering him. The text reports as follows:

Immediately I took a very fine woollen cloth and gave it to Rabbi Akiba, and Rabbi Akiba gave it to a servant of ours, saying: ‘Go and lay this cloth beside a woman who immersed herself a second time. For if that woman will come and declare the circumstances of her menstrual flow before the company, there will be one who forbids her to her husband and the majority will permit. Say to that woman: “Touch this cloth with the end of the middle finger of your hand, and do not press the end of your finger upon it, but rather as a man who takes a hair which had fallen therein from his eyeball, pushing it very gently”.’ They went and did so, and laid the cloth before Rabbi Ishmael.