Ohalos, Chapter 11, Mishnah 5. This mishnah brings the third and last of the cases in which Beis Shammai and Beis Hillel debate one single question: can the body of a living person serve as an ohel, a tent that spreads tumah? Here the setting is a doorway, and the man lying in it is not above the meis but underneath it.
"Haya adam mutal al ha'uskufah": a man has stretched himself out across the doorstep of a house. Whatever his reason (the Mishnah leaves that to our imagination), he has arranged himself with his head resting on the uskufah, the threshold stone, and the remainder of his body reaching inward through the entrance. "V'he'elu alav kovrei hameis": a burial party arrives carrying a meis, and instead of taking a route around him they raise the meis and carry it straight across him while he remains where he is. Imagine what he sees from below: the bier gliding by just over his face.
How does the Mishnah resolve this? Beis Shammai's verdict is stated as "eino meivi es hatumah": nothing is conducted inside. Beis Hillel answer with "meivi es hatumah": the tumah does make its way in.
What the Dispute Is Not About
Before we examine the reasoning, the meforshim insist on one preliminary. Flesh and blood do not serve as a chatzitzah, a barrier that halts tumah. It follows that the tumah of the passing meis comes straight down through him, and the airspace directly below where he lies is rendered tamei. Both houses agree to this much. What is remarkable is the switch from the case just before this one: there the living man was stationed over the meis, whereas now the meis travels above the living man.
The Question at Hand
What the Mishnah wishes to know is the next stage. Granted that tumah has descended and taken hold of the area below him, will it now creep along beneath his body and slip into the house whose entrance his own frame is filling?
Beis Shammai answer in the negative. To their mind a person's torso is one undivided lump of matter, solid from his back straight through to his front. Since nothing separates upper from lower, no hollow exists below the top half of him that could count as a covering, and therefore no ohel has been formed. The tumah that arrived beneath him is stuck there; it will not proceed inside through the entranceway, notwithstanding that some of him is outdoors and some of him indoors.
Beis Hillel answer in the affirmative. They regard the upper half of a body and the lower half as two distinct items, which means that a gap of a tefach stands open below the upper portion of his guf. That gap makes a roof of him: sprawled over the threshold, he has produced an ohel with himself as its covering. Tumah from the meis enters that ohel, and having entered, it moves along beneath him and reaches into the house.
Reviewing the Three Cases
With this mishnah the trio of heichei timtza is finished, three real-life scenarios in which one and the same machlokes is worked out.
- Case one placed the tahor person together with the meis beneath a shared covering.
- Case two had a man stretched through a window, so that his own body served as the covering spread above the meis.
- Case three turns that around: now the meis is the covering, and the tahor person is the one lying below.
In every one of them Beis Shammai hold that a living body cannot function as an ohel that transmits tumah, and Beis Hillel hold that it can. And in each of the three the meforshim are careful to identify the specific chiddush involved, explaining why this scenario had to be recorded rather than derived from its companions.