Episode 18: Woes Part 7--Whitewashed Tombs and False Teachers

Why were the tombs whitewashed? Was it to make them prettier? Nope. Unlike last week's episode, this one was a lot of fun for me because I just love teaching about anything Temple related. Ritual purity, and especially heading into the Passover, was incredibly important and biblically mandated. We're going to delve into the subjects of corpse impurity from Numbers 19, and the whitewashing of the tombs from Shekelim 1.1 in the Mishnah. Perhaps most importantly for today, we are going to investigate our own level of ritual impurity in order to put other forms into perspective--especially the misplaced focus on menstrual impurity in congregations, oftentimes due to a lack of understanding of the Biblical text.