Keilim, Chapter 25, Mishnah 7. Our chapter has been occupied with the distinction between the inside of a utensil and its outside, a distinction that belongs to the rabbinic decree of tameh liquids. This mishnah introduces a third area of the utensil that Hachamim treated as a world of its own: the handgrip, the hollow or indentation into which a person slips his fingers in order to take hold of the utensil and carry it.
A sweeping principle opens the mishnah. "Kol hakelim," all utensils that possess a receptacle, are governed by one set of rules for their interior and another for their exterior, "achorayim vetoch," which is what this chapter has been unfolding. Beyond those two, the mishnah adds, each such utensil carries a further halachah of its own for the "beit hatzevia," the spot set aside for a person's fingers to take hold.
The handgrip as a separate component
Liquid rendered tameh by rabbinic enactment conveys tumah to a utensil. Yet Hachamim refused to view the grip as merely one more stretch of exterior surface; they set it off completely from the remainder of the vessel's outer side. So tameh liquid that lands on the exterior defiles the exterior alone while the grip stays tahor, and tameh liquid that reaches the grip defiles the grip alone while the exterior stays tahor. Halachically the grip is treated as though it had been severed from the utensil, a component with a life of its own.
Does holding the grip mean touching the outside?
The handgrip comes up in a second context as well. When a person takes hold of a utensil by its grip, must we be concerned that his fingers spilled over onto the outside of the utensil too? The question has consequences in both directions. Suppose the outside is tameh and the handgrip is tahor: when he grasped the grip, did he also make contact with the tameh exterior?
Rebbi Tarfon rules: "la'areva gedolah shel etz." He is speaking of a large wooden kneading trough. With such a vessel there is no room to raise the possibility that fingers closing on the grip also reached the exterior surface, since something of those dimensions is customarily picked up by its grip and nothing else. With other utensils, by contrast, we work on the assumption that whoever seizes the grip lets his fingers spread onto the exterior too, and the halachot of tumah follow from that contact.
Rebbi Akiva rules: "lechosot." He stretches the same leniency to cups as well, small though they are. In his understanding cups too are lifted by their grips, and fingers do not wander onto the body of the vessel, so there is nothing here to be suspicious of.
Where the leniency is applied
The mishnah now delineates the situations in which this leniency operates. Rebbi Meir teaches that the exemption from assuming that a grip-holder's fingers reached the exterior applies "leyadayim hateme'ot," to hands bearing the rabbinic level of sheni letumah, when they close around a grip that is tahor.
Some groundwork is needed here. Hachamim enacted that in certain situations a man's hands carry tumah while his body does not. Take one who handles an object that has the level of rishon letumah: a rishon has no power to defile a human being, and yet the Rabbis declared such hands a sheni. In the same way, hands whose whereabouts a person has not been careful to guard, "stam yadayim," were assigned the rank of sheni. Now hands on that level are powerless to defile a utensil, but liquid they do defile. Consequently, when liquid is resting on a utensil and hands of that kind come into contact with it, the liquid is elevated to a rishon, and the liquid then conveys tumah to the utensil itself.
That is exactly the scenario before us. A person whose hands bear tumah takes hold of the grip of a utensil whose exterior is damp. We do not raise the concern that his fingers strayed onto that wet surface and set the entire chain in motion.
"Vetahorot." The same relief is extended to the reverse situation: tahor hands closing on the grip of a utensil whose exterior carries a mild form of tumah, the sort capable of defiling hands by rabbinic decree. The exterior in this case stands at the level of sheni. Such a level has no power to defile a person's hands directly, though it does defile liquid. Thus, were his hands wet, the moisture on them meeting the impure exterior would itself turn tameh and would then transmit tumah to him. The mishnah rules that here too there is no cause for concern.
Rebbi Yose limits the ruling
Rebbi Yose objects: "lo amru," the leniency was pronounced, "ela leyadayim hatehorot bilvad," for tahor hands and for them alone. Where the hands themselves bear tumah, whoever grasped the grip must indeed reckon with the possibility that his fingers reached the body of the vessel and rendered it impure. But where his hands were tahor and the worry was that he himself would contract tumah through the moisture on his hands meeting the impure vessel, in that case he has nothing whatsoever to be concerned about.
The mishnah thus leaves us with a striking picture of how finely Hachamim mapped a single vessel: its inside, its outside, and the small hollow made for a person's fingers, each with a status of its own, and each with its own measure of concern for what a hand may or may not have touched.