Degrees of impurity in the Talmud's construction of reality

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Appreciating the Talmud’s Sublime Devotion to Torah for Its Own Sake: Daf Yomi: For the rabbis, trivial—even outdated or immaterial—problems can provide the best thought experiments.

The detail and precision of the arguments are even more impressive when you remember that the whole subject was doubly abstract. Not only was tumah an invisible, incorporeal status, a pure concept; it was a concept that applied only in the Temple, where it affected the status of the priests and the sacrifices. But by the time the Talmud was edited, around 500 C.E., the Temple had been gone for 400 years—as much time as separates us today from Shakespeare. For the Amoraim, there were no sacrifices to perform, and in Babylonia, where they lived, there was no requirement to tithe crops at all.

Yet the rabbis devoted as much intellectual force to getting tumah right as if it were still a matter of life and death, and they write about the sacrifices as if they might be called on to perform one tomorrow. The law, for them, existed in a virtual realm, immune from time and change. This devotion to Torah for its own sake is, for me, one of the most foreign things about the Talmud—and one of the most sublime.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.