56. Ritual Purity and Impurity
As noted above (in section 54), the Rambam says that the laws of ritual purity and impurity serve to limit people's ability to enter the Temple at will. This served to create a sense of awe and reverence for the Temple, in line with Leviticus 19:30, “…you shall revere My sanctuary.” [III, 47]
Human nature is that when people get too familiar with something, no matter how sublime it may be, its esteem gets lowered in their eyes. (In English, we say that “familiarity breeds contempt.”) Well aware of this phenomenon, the Sages ruled that a person should not make a habit of going to the Temple whenever he felt like it. They supported this by applying the words of Proverbs 25:17, “Make your foot rare in the house of your friend.”
For this reason, those who were ritually unclean were not permitted to enter the Temple. There are so many types of ritual impurity that only a small percentage of the people were actually ritually clean at any given time. One might avoid touching a large animal that died on its own, but he would not as easily be able to avoid the carcasses of “sheratzim.” (There are eight such sheratzim – “crawling things” – but exact identification is difficult for us. Contenders include chameleons, ferrets, hedgehogs, weasels, moles, toads, snails and slugs.) If one avoids these, he might not avoid touching a niddah (menstruant woman), a zav or a zavah (a man or woman who experienced various emissions), or a metzora (popularly translated as a leper but really something else entirely), or he might experience a seminal emission. Even after purifying himself, one would need to wait until after sunset to enter the Temple. Since he can’t go at night, he must wait until the next morning; in the interim, he might become impure again, such as through marital relations. Even a ritually clean person was not permitted to enter the Temple for ritual services without first immersing himself. All this kept people from entering the Temple indiscriminately, which would lead to them taking it for granted.
Another way in which the laws of ritual impurity are useful is that it provides us with motivation to distance ourselves from things that are unclean. Failing that, they prevent us from spreading that contamination to the Temple. And the laws of ritual impurity are not particularly burdensome; they only impede entering the Temple and interacting with sanctified things associated with the Temple. (See, for example, Leviticus 12:4, “…she shall touch no sanctified thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purification are fulfilled.”) Ritual impurity does not affect our daily lives and occupations. There is no sin in being ritually impure; if one chooses to remain in such a state, such is his prerogative. (Kohanim are not permitted to intentionally defile themselves through corpse uncleanliness because that particular form of impurity takes longer to cleanse and they have to be “on call” at the Temple.) One may likewise choose to eat ritually unclean food. Outside of the Temple and things related to it, the only aspect of life really impacted by ritual impurity is marital relations.
At first glance, the laws of ritual impurity are pretty bewildering, especially in our day and age. But upon a little reflection, it becomes apparent just how useful these laws can be.
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