Shekalim 21

Up the Down Staircase

What a beautiful mishna to finish our posts of Shekalim with! The mishna at the beginning of the eighth chapter tells us that if we find vessels in Jerusalem, near the mikve, are they considered pure or impure? Rabbi Meir answers that it depends on where they are found:

דרך ירידה לבית הטבילה, טמאין, ודרך עליה טהורין, שלא כירידתן עלייתן. . .

Unlike our current inclination to be machmir about things that are unknown, Rabbi Meir says see what information you have and decide based on that. If the vessels are on their way down to the mikve, then clearly they have not been immersed yet and are impure. And if they are on their way up, they have been purified and you should feel free to use them.

The mishna assumes that there are two ways to approach the mikve, one going in and one coming out. The commentators understood the basic principle. The Korban HaEdah explains that there was an entrance and an exit to the mikve so that the impure would not touch the pure and thereby render them impure as well.

However, as much as the principle was grasped, it was only made real in the last few decades with the discovery of mikvaot from the Second Temple period. Today most Israeli children can identify an ancient mikve but fifty years ago they had not yet been exposed. As they were, some Mikvaot clearly had a divider down the middle of the stairs – not a wall per se but enough of a marker to keep people from bumping into each other. A famous example is this one at the southern edge of the western wall:

The most spectacular example of this phenomenon was discovered on the ancient Derekh haAvot, the Path of the Patriarchs. This was a route that went along the mountain ridge from Beersheba to Hebron, to Jerusalem and north to Shechem. Because that is the route most often used by Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov, it received the name Derekh HaAvot:

Part of this ancient road has been exposed in today’s Gush Etzion, between Alon Shvut and Neve Daniel. And on this road was discovered an enormous ancient mikve with two beautiful openings: an entrance and an exit:

Scholars assume that as this mikve was literally on the road, less than a half-day’s walk to Jerusalem, it was used by olei regel, pilgrims coming to the Temple who needed to purify themselves. An added advantage to dipping here, as opposed to in Jerusalem, is that by the time you arrived in Jerusalem it would be nightfall and you would be pure (if you needed והערב שמש).

I am particularly happy to finish Shekalim with this post because this is one of the first sites that I saw that really emphasized to me the concept of אין תורה כתורת ארץ ישראל, there is no Torah like the Torah of the land of Israel and seeing is not only believing, but also understanding. That insight was given to me by a wonderful teacher and colleague, Aryeh Rotenberg, and this post is dedicated to him. Thanks Aryeh!