Three Handbreadths of New Earth

The Hook

Near the end of the tenth chapter there is a ruling that reads like a riddle somebody forgot to finish. A grave was plowed over in a field once, the blade caught the bones and dragged them, and the Sages declared the whole square impure, a hundred cubits on every side. Now the owner wants his land back, and the Rambam gives him three ways to get it. Sift the surface through a fine sieve and pick out every fragment the size of a barleycorn. Or lay three handbreadths of outside earth across the field. Or strip three handbreadths off the top and cart them away.

Then comes the sentence that stops you. If he removed a handbreadth and a half from the surface and laid a handbreadth and a half of outside earth in its place, his actions are of no consequence. Take a ruler to it. There are now three handbreadths between a man's foot and the layer where the fragments lie, the same three that would have finished the matter had he gone one way alone. The field is still impure.

Half of one remedy plus half of the other does not add up to a remedy. That sentence, in one form after another, is what these three chapters are about, and it is worth holding before we go into buried corpses, crushed bone, and finally the ground of the whole world outside the Land.

Tum'at Met 9: How Much Earth Belongs to a Body

Chapter nine opens on a man digging in his own field who finds what he was not looking for. Many corpses in one pit. Or bodies of people who were slain. Or a corpse sitting upright, or with its head between its knees. His first thought is the obvious one, that he has stumbled into an old cemetery and the property is finished. The Rambam tells him not to be concerned. He takes up the corpses, takes the soft earth beneath them, digs three fingerbreadths into the virgin soil under that, removes all of it, and the rest of the field is as pure as it was the morning before. That soft earth together with the three fingerbreadths has a name. It is called the tevusah of the corpse.

Notice what the name is doing. A body in the ground is not only a body. Some quantity of the ground has become part of it, and the halachah says exactly how much. Three fingerbreadths of untouched soil beneath whatever the body has already softened. Past that boundary, earth is only earth.

The chapter then works out when scattered graves become a neighborhood of graves. Three corpses lying in the manner corpses are ordinarily buried, spaced four to eight cubits apart, which is room for a bier and the men carrying it, makes the ground a burial area, and twenty further cubits must be checked out from the last grave. Find nothing and those twenty cubits are pure even sitting alongside graves. But if even one of the corpses was slain, or sitting, or lying with its head between its knees, nothing further is checked at all, because we presume these are gentiles, whose graves do not convey impurity through a tent.

The relief keeps coming. A corpse buried without the owner's permission needs the tevusah but not the inspection, since a trespasser cannot make a man's field into a cemetery. And the inspection itself is beautifully practical. You dig a cubit, leave a cubit, dig a cubit, and continue, because there is never less than a cubit between one grave and the next. Reach a river or a public road and you stop. The burial area has been interrupted.

Then the chapter closes on a note that recolors everything before it. All of these impurities that rest on doubt, the Rambam says flatly, are Rabbinic safeguards. Scripturally, only a person who has definitely contracted impurity is impure, and every stringency built on doubt, in impurity, in forbidden foods, in the Sabbath, is Rabbinic in origin. He then shuts the door he just opened: where an intentional violation would carry karet, Scriptural law does forbid acting into the possibility.

Tum'at Met 10: The Bone You Will Never Find

Chapter ten introduces the beit hapras, and the definition is one line. A place where a grave was plowed over. Since the bones are crushed and dispersed by the blade, the Sages decreed the field impure, and they decreed it even if there was a coffin, even if two stories of earth stood above it. The plow went through, so the field is a beit hapras: a hundred cubits square from the grave, an area sown with four se'ah of grain.

The impurity is specific. The earth defiles by touch and by being carried, not through a tent, and a man standing over a beit hapras is pure. The danger is not the air above the field but the possibility in the ground, and the Rambam sizes that possibility for us. A bone the size of a barleycorn.

Everything after that is boundary work, running in both directions. A man plowing over a grave who shakes out his plow before finishing the hundred cubits has made a beit hapras only that far, and past a hundred cubits the field is pure, because bones will not carry farther. Buried bones are presumed human unless known otherwise; exposed bones are presumed to be animal. A trench of human bones plowed into a field makes no beit hapras, nor does plowing a field where a grave was lost, because the Sages legislated for the common case and not the strange one. Rain washes the earth of a beit hapras down onto a pure field below and the lower field stays pure. A beit hapras does not make a second beit hapras.

And yet within the field the caution is astonishing. Trees may be planted, since their roots run below three handbreadths and below three handbreadths the field is pure, the bones being spread across the surface. Sow and harvest by uprooting and you must sift the grain twice, beans three times, in case there is a bone the size of a barleycorn in it, and burn the chaff on the spot, lest a man carry it out, sell it, and spread the impurity across the country. Walk on stones that do not wobble and you are pure. And when the field is purified at last, it is purified before two Torah scholars, which tells you this was never a matter of engineering.

Tum'at Met 11: The Ground of Exile

Chapter eleven turns the same machinery on the rest of the planet. Our Sages decreed that a clod of earth from outside the Land be treated like a beit hapras, so that walking on it, touching it, or carrying it defiles. Afterwards they decreed on its airspace too, so that a man who put his head and the greater part of his body into it became impure without touching anything.

The two decrees are deliberately unequal. Impurity from the earth is severe: terumah and sacrificial food are burned, the man carries a seven day impurity, and the ashes of the Red Heifer are sprinkled on him on the third day and the seventh. Impurity from the airspace alone is lighter: he immerses and waits for sunset, and terumah that caught it is held in suspension, neither eaten nor burned. Even the quantity is fixed, a clod the size of a seal for sacks, and scattered specks do not combine. Letters used to arrive from abroad for the sons of the High Priests, and their seals amounted to a se'ah or two of foreign clay, and nobody was concerned, because no single seal was as large as the seal of a sack.

Then the exemptions, which read like a man drawing a coastline. Travel by sea, or along the strip the waves wash over, and the earth decree does not touch you, though the airspace decree still does. Enter in a cabinet or chest carried through the air and you are impure anyway, because a tent that moves is not a tent. Syria is impure in its earth and pure in its airspace, no decree having been made there, so a stretch of Syria running up against the Land with nothing impure between can be crossed in a sealed chest in purity. A place inside the Land where gentiles lived is treated like foreign soil until inspected, in case a miscarried fetus was buried there, and the measure of residence is forty days. Ten kinds of place are exempt outright, from Arab tents and sukkot to the bathhouse and the soldiers' barracks, since none is a settled dwelling.

And then the last line of the chapter, where the Rambam appears to be doing bookkeeping and is doing something else. The roadways the pilgrims took up from Babylon run through country surrounded by the earth of the nations. They are presumed pure.

The Unifying Principle

Read these chapters again through that sentence at the end of chapter nine. All of this is Rabbinic. Scripturally, only certainty defiles. Everything here is a fence built around a maybe.

Which is exactly why every item in it has a number bolted to it. Three fingerbreadths of virgin soil. Twenty cubits of inspection. A hundred cubits square. A bone the size of a barleycorn. Three handbreadths of covering. Forty days of residence. Certainty announces its own edges, since you know where a corpse is. Doubt has none, so if you legislate on doubt you must draw the edges yourself, in cubits, or the fence quietly swallows the world. The numbers are not fussiness. They are the only thing standing between a reasonable caution and a life in which no field, no vegetable, no letter from abroad and no road is usable.

And now the riddle resolves. Three handbreadths laid on top is a form, covering. Three handbreadths stripped away is a different form, removal. A handbreadth and a half of each is neither, and no arithmetic will make it one, because what the Sages decreed was never a quantity of soil. It was a description of a state, and a description cannot be met halfway from two directions at once.

The Baal Shem Tov taught that no place is empty of Him, and the teaching has an edge here. The Sages could declare the ground of the entire Diaspora impure only because they were never describing the ground. Soil is soil in Babylon and in Hebron. What the decree touches is a condition laid over the soil, which is why erosion carries the earth downhill without carrying the decree.

Modern Application

These chapters land on the fifth of Elul, and the Alter Rebbe's image for this month is a king who has left the palace and gone out into the field, where anyone may come to him and he receives every one with a pleasant face. We tend to picture that field as pastoral. Read chapter ten and you will not manage it again. A field in this month is a worked field, which is to say a plowed one, and plowing is the act that creates a beit hapras. The King in Elul is standing on ground that has been turned over, where something once whole got caught by the blade and broken into pieces too small to point at.

Everyone has a field like that. Something was buried there, intact, and you knew where it was, and then it was plowed. A friendship, a decade, a version of yourself you could still describe in a sentence. The cruelty of a beit hapras is that it offers nothing to retrieve, and the Rambam never once suggests you go find it.

What he offers is three real options and one that fails. Sift, which is to go over the surface patiently and pick out what you can actually identify. Strip three handbreadths off and stand on what is underneath. Or lay three handbreadths of new earth on top and build there. What you cannot do is take a handbreadth and a half off one side and lay a handbreadth and a half over it and call the matter closed, which is of course the thing everybody tries. A little facing it and a little covering it. The measurement comes out right and nothing has changed.

One more distinction is worth carrying out of chapter nine. A man digging the inspection trench stays pure and may eat terumah until impurity is actually found. A man digging out a landslide may not, because it is certain there are bodies under there and the only question is where. Working where something might be wrong and working where you know something is wrong are not the same condition, and most of the anxiety people carry is the first treated as the second.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe returned constantly to the point that this last exile is not a sentence being served but an assignment being carried out, that the ground of the nations is where the work is. Chapter eleven is the shadow of that idea in halachah. The Sages made the soil of exile impure, then spent the chapter marking every route through it that stays clean.

The Closing

Which brings us back to that last line. The pilgrim roads out of Babylon are surrounded on all sides by the earth of the nations, and they are presumed pure. Presumed pure, because of what they are for. A road that men walk to reach Jerusalem is not defiled by the country it crosses.

The Sfat Emet reads the work of Elul this way, that a person becomes new not by acquiring something he lacked but by uncovering what was never damaged underneath. Three handbreadths down, the Rambam says, the field is pure. It always was. The bones are on the surface.

Decide, then, which of the three you are doing this month. Sift, and go over the surface honestly, fragment by fragment. Strip, and stand on what was underneath the whole time. Or cover, and build three full handbreadths of new ground and grow something there. Any of the three works. The one that never works is the one that measures out to the same depth and leaves the field exactly as it was.