Sotah 059

1:
Before we continue with the explication of this mishnah I must correct a technical error. Yesterday I referred everyone to an explanation in Tractate Yadayyim and the link did not work in all cases. Click here for the correct link. Please find there a full explanation of the opening words of our present mishnah, 'on that very day'. This mishnah and those that follow in this chapter have nothing to do with the subject of our tractate. We have seen on other occasions that the mention of a certain fact or method will sometimes provoke a series of mishnayot that follow the same pattern. (This was probably something left over from the period when the Oral Torah was not written down, and such groupings were a useful 'aide memoire' for the people with prodigious memories who conned this material by rote.)

2:
When we studied Tractate Yadayyim we gave a long introduction to the concept of ritual impurity in Judaism. I wrote:

3:
Rabban Yoĥanan ben-Zakkai was the greatest of the sages who assembled in the vineyard in the village of Yavneh after the destruction of the Bet Mikdash (70 CE) in order to reconstitute Judaism and to package it so as it could continue to function without the Bet Mikdash and – eventually – without Eretz-Israel. He was the only president of the Sanhedrin who was not of the line of Hillel. (Modern scholarship thinks that Yavneh was a Roman concentration camp where 'left-wing' defectors were interned.) He was of the opinion – according to our mishnah – that there was no obvious biblical basis for the teaching of the sages that ritual impurity could be passed on by continuous contagion.

4:
Let us assume that the carcass of a reptile or insect falls into a cooking pan. That carcass is a prime source of ritual impurity (as well as of hygienic impurity). The plain meaning of the verse of the Torah [Leviticus 11:33] is that contact with this source of impurity renders the pan itself ritually impure. The plain meaning of the verse is that anything in the pan also contracts this ritual impurity by a kind of contagion.

5:
In our mishnah the imaginary pan is considered to contain a loaf of bread. That loaf of bread is, of course, ritually impure, by virtue of the clear instruction of the biblical verse: "everything in it [the pan into which the carcass fell] shall contract ritual impurity" as well. The sages held that if that loaf is removed from the pan and it touches another loaf it continues to pass on its ritual impurity to this second loaf. Rabban Yoĥanan ben-Zakkai held that there was no biblical basis for that view of the sages: everything that is in the utensil becomes impure, but that does not imply that it will pass on that impurity to something that is outside the utensil.

6:
What Rabbi Akiva does with the verse in order to 'prove' that such ritual impurity is 'infinitely contagious' can only be understood when we bear in mind that the vocalization of the text of the Torah (eventually consolidated by the Massoretes) was still fluid to a certain extent. Without changing the consonants of one word in the sentence, a slight change of vocalization can bring about a significant change: the Hebrew word 'yitma' יִטְמָא ['shall contract ritual impurity'] can be vocalized to read 'yetamé' יְטַמֵּא ['shall impart ritual impurity']. Thus the verse would now mean that "any earthenware utensil into which one of them shall fall and everything in it shall impart ritual impurity [ad infinitum]."

7:
Rabbi Yehoshu'a was one of the two greatest students of Rabban Yoĥanan ben-Zakkai. Akiva, who was destined to become one of the greatest scholars of all time, at that stage was almost a nonentity. Rabbi Yehoshu'a, himself one of the prime teachers of Rabbi Akiva, exclaims that if only the now deceased Rabban Yoĥanan ben-Zakkai could have lived to see this day! He had assumed that one day in the future someone would prove that in such circumstances there is no further ritual contagion, and here is Rabbi Akiva 'proving' the opposite. The phrase 'would that the dust might fall off your eyes' refers to the dead sage who has been buried in the earth and is thus 'sleeping in the dust'.