Artifact

Mira Balberg

In the book of Leviticus we find a lengthy description of the procedure for inspecting an afflicted house—that is, a house in which mildew was seen in one of the walls. Once a house has been rendered impure on account of such affliction, the Pentateuch stresses, everything that is in it is immediately rendered impure as well. Thus, in order to protect one's property from impurity, prior to official inspection by a priest the house should be cleared of all its contents—namely, furniture and utensils, clothes and bedding, cushions and boxes, and everything else a person may own. The creators of the Mishnah, a formative Jewish rabbinic codex that was compiled around the turn of the third century c.e., took note of the biblical text's attention to what may seem like an entirely trivial matter: everyday household objects. A mishnaic tradition attributed to Rabbi Meir (a mid-second-century sage) presents the care for such articles as a heartening indication of the Torah's compassion for human beings:

Said Rabbi Meir: What is it that might be rendered impure for him?

If you will say his wooden articles and his clothes and his metal articles—he immerses them, and they are then rendered pure!

Rather, what is it that the Torah spares?

His clay articles, his pitcher and his ewer.

If this is how the Torah spares his negligible property, all the more so his precious property; If so for his property, all the more so for the lives of his sons and daughters; If so for that of the wicked, all the more so for that of the righteous.

According to Rabbi Meir, in regard to most articles there is no real reason to be concerned that they may contract impurity, since they can be purified by a simple act of ritual immersion. The only articles that will actually become unusable if they contract impurity are clay articles, which cannot be immersed and must be broken down if they have become impure. However, since clay was a cheap and ubiquitous material in the rabbinic period, clay objects (such as pitchers and ewers used for oil) were of relatively little importance and were easily replaceable. If God spares even such lowly and disposable articles, says Rabbi Meir, then all the more so he spares the lives of human beings.

This passage powerfully makes the point that household objects, even of the most mundane kind, are an inseparable part of human life. Clearly, utensils and furniture are not as important to persons as the lives of their children; but nonetheless persons have some sort of personal investment in them—which, according to Rabbi Meir, scripture remarkably acknowledges and respects. To understand the human habitat, to be attentive to human needs and concerns, is also to be conscious of the array of things that inhabit the world in which human beings work, sleep, cook, eat, sew, plow, dress, paint, write, and perform various other activities—which all involve, at least in most cases, some artifact. This applies to the affluent modern world as much as it applies to the world of second-century Palestine: although we rarely take heed of the fact that there is hardly any facet of our daily life in which we do not make use of various artifacts, the most banal and mundane objects are what allow us to perform the most basic tasks as well as the most elevated and highly esteemed activities. As the French sociologist Bruno Latour put it, if you are convinced that inanimate objects make no difference in human lives, try "hitting a nail with and without a hammer, boiling water with and without a kettle, fetching provisions with or without a basket, walking in the street with or without clothes, zapping a TV with or without a remote," and so forth. The realm of everyday life, then, is laden with and defined by artifacts.

The Mishnah, from which the passage I quoted above is taken, is perhaps best described as a treatise on the everyday—an everyday that is designed, shaped, lived, and reflected upon in accordance with Jewish law as the rabbis who created the Mishnah understood it. It is a lengthy and systematic attempt to encompass every single aspect of the human world—from the manufacture of wine and oil to the upkeep of one's henhouse, from building a staircase to hiring workers—insofar as all these aspects are in some way mandated by halakhah. With this tremendous attention to the details of which daily life consists, it is not surprising that we find in the Mishnah recurring references to artifacts—both to specific items and to artifacts as a general category. I am using the word "artifacts" as a less-than-perfect translation for the Hebrew term kelim(sg. keli), which serves in rabbinic literature to denote usable objects of all kinds—furniture, clothes, utensils, and so on. I choose the word "artifacts" (rather than "articles" or "vessels," sometimes proposed as translations for kelim) to emphasize both the inclusive nature of this category and the most critical quality of a keli as the rabbis understood it—namely that it is an object made by and for human beings. Objects that have not been in any way given form or processed by human beings, such as rocks or logs of wood, do not fall under the category of kelim, and the rabbinic science of artifacts, which will stand at the center of this chapter, does not apply to them.

It is easily understood why the Mishnah, as a text that applies norms to every aspect of daily life, closely engages with various artifacts and their functions: the attempt to legislate what people should or should not do in specific circumstances closely involves the question what they should or should not do with specific artifacts. When discussing the Sabbath, for instance, as a day on which no labor may be performed, the question which artifacts may or may not be used is crucial; likewise, when setting down detailed rules regarding the retrieval of lost objects, this entails a consideration of different kinds of artifacts that people may lose; and other similar examples are abundant. In this respect, artifacts are of concern to the rabbis of the Mishnah insofar as they play a part in the various actions and behaviors that the Mishnah is trying to regulate. However, the rabbis did more than occasionally refer to artifacts in the course of developing other halakhic topics; they also dedicated an entire tractate in the Mishnah, and a very sizable one, solely to the topic of artifacts.

Tractate Kelim, which is the second largest in the entire...