Ohalos, Chapter 18, Mishnah 8. This chapter has been occupied with the dwelling place of a non-Jew, which Chazal declared tamei out of the concern that a nefel, a miscarried fetus, may have been buried somewhere on the premises. A dirah of that kind can be purified, but only through bedikah, a search. Our mishnah now asks the practical question that every such search raises: where exactly does one look?
The mishnah opens: "Es mah heim bodkin?" What is it that they check? If a person wishes to establish that no nefel lies buried in this dwelling and thereby to be metaher it, which places demand his attention?
The Sewers and the Foul Water
The answer given is: "habivin ha'amukim," the deep bivin. A biv is a drainage channel, the sort of pipe or conduit found in those houses. Water that was no longer wanted was poured into it, and from there it ran out into the reshus harabim. Precisely these channels must be searched, since they are a convenient place to dispose of something one wishes to hide.
The Bartenura records another girsa in place of this word: instead of bivin, the text reads kuchin, which are hollows or caves beneath the level of the ground. These too are exactly the kind of concealed space that must be checked.
The mishnah continues: "v'es hamayim haseruchim," and the foul water. It is not enough to examine the pipe itself; even the putrid, stagnant water standing inside the biv has to be searched through.
Beis Shammai: The Garbage Heaps and the Crumbled Earth
Beis Shammai add to the list: "af ha'ashpatos v'afar tichuach." An ashpah is a refuse heap, a garbage dump, and that is an obvious place to look. But afar tichuach means earth that is finely crumbled, ground up almost to powder. Why should that require examination? After all, the searcher is looking for a nefel, and what is there to find in pulverized dirt?
The answer is that this very condition of the soil is itself the sign. Earth becomes crumbled and powdery in that way because something was buried there and decomposed into it. According to Beis Shammai, wherever the ground presents that appearance, that is exactly the spot the searcher must investigate.
Beis Hillel: Where the Animals Can Reach
Beis Hillel take the opposite approach and lay down a general principle: "kol makom", any location at all, to which "hachazir vehachuldah yecholim lehalech bo", a pig and a weasel have walking access, is "eino tzarich bedikah", exempt from searching entirely. In the Bartenura the wording appears as chazir u'bardelos. Chazir is a pig; chuldah is a weasel. The relevant trait these animals have in common is their powerful sense of smell. They sniff out a nefel that lies buried, dig down to it and eat it. It follows that once such creatures can get into an area, the original worry evaporates: had a nefel ever been there, it would have been carried off long ago. The whole leniency rests, of course, on the animals actually being able to get in; a place sealed off from them remains subject to bedikah.
So the picture that emerges from our mishnah is that purifying such a dirah involves some decidedly unpleasant labor. One must be bodek the deep drainage channels and even sift through the rancid water standing in them, unless a chazir or a chuldah can get in there, in which case no bedikah is needed at all, since the animals have already taken care of the matter.
Oseik B'Taharah in the Sewer
Picture the scene for a moment. A man is standing in a sewer with gloves on his hands, up to his arms in mayim seruchim, in fetid decayed water, and we ask him what he is busy with. His answer: "I am oseik b'taharah. I am purifying a house." What a remarkable world we live in.
It happens that a person finds himself somewhere Hakodosh Boruch Hu has placed him, and the thought will not leave him: of all places, why here? And the answer that comes back is: rely on Me. What looks to you like the lowest corner of creation is, from My side, a chance handed to you to busy yourself with taharah.
I once heard the following. A storm had left a basement under water, and inside it were sefarim, and, nebach, even a pair of tefillin. The water sitting there had turned putrid. A rebbe brought his talmidim along to lend a hand to someone he knew whose house it was. One of the boys in that group had never been much of a learner. We will call him Chaim, a name chosen at random. Chaim kept going down into that water, over and over, to the point where the others started worrying about him.
What lay beneath the surface turned out to be nearly a complete Shas. The owner, nebach, had been given a chosson Shas, and now it was destroyed. The boys were rescuing whatever could still be salvaged from those volumes, and it is not hard to picture the state they were in after soaking in such water. One masechta could not be located: Kiddushin. Eventually the owner called a halt, saying it was simply not healthy to remain in that water any longer. Chaim, though, would not let it go: he had to find it. The rebbe found this strange, since Chaim was hardly the boy who normally poured himself into learning. He pleaded for one more descent, and they let him. Down he went, up he came, and there in his hands was Gemara Kiddushin. Everyone broke into cheers.
Chaim then turned to the owner and asked if the volume could be his. The owner could not fathom why anyone would want it, and mentioned that perhaps he would have to produce it for the insurance claim. Chaim replied that no insurance agent was ever going to notice that a single Kiddushin was absent, and repeated his request to take it home. The owner gave his consent.
The following day Chaim came into the classroom carrying it. The pages would hardly separate from one another, and the windows had to be thrown open because of the odor. The rebbe asked him to explain himself. With his eyes wet, Chaim answered: I climbed down into the mud to bring this Gemara up. Something tells me that this Gemara is going to climb down into the mud and bring me up. That is precisely what happened. All year long he learned out of that volume, his whole life took a different direction, and he grew into mamash one of the outstanding boys in the shiur.
We simply cannot see ahead. What is asked of us is to receive whatever place Hashem assigns to us. It may strike us as the lowest and filthiest spot imaginable, and it may turn out to be the richest wellspring of taharah and strength we are ever handed. A person has to place his trust in Hashem.