Daily Talk
A field where a grave was plowed over can be made pure by laying three handbreadths of fresh earth across it, or by stripping three handbreadths away. Do a handbreadth and a half of each and the Rambam says your actions are of no consequence. The distance is identical. Why does half of one remedy plus half of the other come to nothing?
Three Handbreadths of New Earth
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About This Talk
Chapter 9 fixes how far a buried body reaches into the ground, naming the soft earth together with three fingerbreadths of virgin soil the tevusah of the corpse, then works out when three ordinary graves make a burial area that obliges an inspection of twenty further cubits, how that trench is dug and what interrupts it, and closes by stating flatly that every impurity in these chapters that rests on doubt is a Rabbinic safeguard rather than Scriptural law. Chapter 10 defines the beit hapras as a field in which a grave was plowed over, sets its reach at a hundred cubits square and its danger at a bone the size of a barleycorn, and then spends itself on limits, exempting the man who plows ground that is not his, the gentile who plows his own, and the field below that receives the washed earth, before giving three ways to purify such a field and ruling that half of one way combined with half of another accomplishes nothing. Chapter 11 turns the same machinery on the soil of the Diaspora, decreeing first its earth and then its airspace with deliberately unequal severity, fixing the measure at a clod the size of a seal for sacks, exempting the sea, Syria's airspace, ten kinds of impermanent dwelling, and finally the roadways that the pilgrims took up from Babylon, which run through the earth of the nations and are presumed pure.