Yevamot II 75: Ritual Purity and Male Infertility

There are verses in Leviticus that create difficulty for the rabbis.  Women shall not touch any holy thing while the are ritually impure, men shall not eat holy things until they are pure, and the setting sun brings purity.  

How can the rabbis reconcile these verses with our instructions from the Mishna?  When are people permitted to eat teruma? To eat from the second tithe? To immerse?  How can we understand G-d's intentions when the guidelines are almost contradictory?  The rabbis discuss numerous possibilities in amid (a).

Amud (b) focuses on the Mishna's instructions regarding a man whose penis or testicles are less than perfect.  The rabbis discuss the testicles, the penis and the seminal 'cords'.  They consider injuries including crushing, severing, and piercing.  The rabbis consider differences in injury including birth differences and injuries; illnesses and inconsequential blemishes.  Clearly the concern is primarily around procreation: is this man capable of fathering children?  

However, for some reason, the rabbis are concerned that the head of the penis be present.  Even a hairbreadth of the corona is enough, but the corona must exist.  Why? Is the notion of a working penis without a head somehow a problem?  Perhaps this has to do with the rite of the covenant; with circumcision.  Perhaps the rabbis want all men to have that reminder with them if they are to cohabit with their wives.  Without that physical reminder, perhaps sex would just be about pleasure and not about one's (men's) connection with G-d.

A man with one testicle is considered to be like a eunuch, a man born without testicles.  As long as this man can procreate, he is able to partake of teruma.  Injuries seemed more suspicious, though.  We are reminded that the rabbis lived in a place and time where an injury often led to infection, which often led to major disfunction or even death.

Some of the rabbis comments seem gratuitous; an excuse to speak graphically about sex.  They speak of the shape of a man's injured penis and how it might rub against a woman's genitals.  They debate: if a man's penis has been injured and now is shaped like a quill or like a gutter, is he fit to eat teruma? Second tithes? etc.  Can he plug the hole, they wonder?  The very explicit imagery of their language suggests that the rabbis may have used this question as an opportunity to discuss sexual intercourse in great detail.