What is required for a Jew to be considered ritually clean under Jewish law? Can a non-Jew be considered ritually clean? Are there different requirements for Jews and non-Jews? What does a red heifer have to do with ritual cleanliness?
Here’s some information on the ritual of the red heifer.
I had read that thing about the red heifer, but I am not sure I get it.
Is any Jew today ritually clean? It seems that they are not.
From the link:
That Red Heifer stuff looks like typical fortune-teller crap to me.
Jebus:
That is correct.
What does it mean for a Jew to be ritually clean vs. ritually unclean?
As Chaim alreadly confirmed, no one is ritually pure in this day and age.
This is an interesting discussion, actually. A Rabbi who lives in my area likes to say that one of the greatest disservices ever done to the Jewish religion is the King James Bible’s translation of the words “tahor” and “tamei” as “clean” and “unclean.” Those words imply something inherently bad, even dirty, about being tamei, which is a state more conventionally defined as “impure.”
The definition I like to use, though, is that someone who is tamei is disqualified from doing something. Being impure is not any sort of judgment on the person or his state; he’s just disqualified from doing temple service, or from living among people who need to be pure, for a short while. But there’s nothing inherently negative about impurity.
There are a couple of ways to know that. First of all, as this wikipedia article on the red heifer mentions, the cohen, or priest, that does the purifying in the red heifer ceremony becomes impure even as the subject of the cermony becomes pure. If being impure was a deeply negative thing, then how could the law force the priests to subject themselves to becoming impure? Rather, being pure or impure is just a technical state that enables you to do, or prevents you from doing, something.
Another indication is that in Judaism, the greatest act of chessed, loving kindness, that a person can do is to bury a dead person that has no one to bury him. This act is considered to be one of tremendous righteousness, because the person who does it had no tie to the dead person, receives no tangible benifit for doing it, and can never be repaid. The spiritual reward for burying this person is said to be massive. But, of course, because touching a dead person makes you ritually impure, then the person who does this great thing becomes impure. If impurity is the consequence of one of the greatest acts a Jew can perform, then obviously, there’s no dirty or evil connotation to being impure.
The only laws of purity that apply on a day-to-day basis in the absence of the Temple are that a priest should avoid coming in contact with a dead person, and the laws of marital/family purity. Those laws govern when a woman is pure/impure as relates to her menstrual cycle. As I said before, purity is nothing more than a disqualification. In this case, being impure in this sense disqualifies a woman from having sex with her husband until she’s pure again. There may be other areas of purity law that apply today, but I can’t think of any other than these two.
Keep in mind that Judaism isn’t the only religion with the idea of ritual purity. Indeed, it is almost universal (the closest Christians get is baptism and confession). Islam, Hinduism, some forms of Budhism and various other religions (such as the traditional religon of the Roma and Zoroasteranism) have the idea of being ritually “clean” and “unclean” and cermonies related to that.
There are “purity” laws (the previously-mentioned concept of “eligibility” is a much better way to look at it) in Eastern Orthodoxy, though these days they’re often not observed. A man may not have sex with his wife when she’s menstruating, and a menstruating woman or a person who is actively bleeding may not take communion. Also, a man who has an ejaculation the night before or the morning of a Liturgy is also ineligible to take communion, though if he is a clergyman there is a specific ritual he may perform if there’s a necessity for him to serve Liturgy. Of course, anybody in danger of death may always receive communion. A woman also refrains from entering a church for 40 days after childbirth.
Blood is not permitted in the sanctuary, and if blood is spilled on an altar you don’t have an altar anymore, though I’d have to check whether it can be reconsecrated or if it’s permenantly ineligible to be used. If an altar is used by heretics or pagans, it may not be used until it has been purified. Also, Sacred objects may not be made of animal (or, rather, vertebrate) parts, so there are no leather covers for Gospels or liturgical books. The Oriental Orthodox extend this to forbidding all animal products, including leather clothing, from the sanctuary; clergy either wear special knit slippers in the sanctuary or go barefoot.
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