If One Touched His Body Right After Bathing

As a general rule, one must wash his hands after touching a part of the body which is normally covered, due to the accumulation of perspiration on these areas. If one does not have water, it suffices to wipe the hands on some surface, and he may then learn Torah, pray or recite Berachot. The Ben Ish Hai (Rav Yosef Haim of Baghdad, 1833-1909), in his work Rav Pe'alim, writes that if one touched these parts of the body immediately after bathing, when his body is perfectly clean, then he is not required to wash his hands. Since this requirement is strictly a matter of cleanliness, and not because of impurity on the hands, it does not apply if the body was clean when it was touched. Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach (Jerusalem, 1910-1995) disagreed, maintaining that one must wash his hands even in this case, but Hacham Ovadia Yosef accepted the lenient ruling of the Ben Ish Hai. Similarly, the Ben Ish Hai elsewhere (in Torah Li'shmah) writes that if one touched normally-covered parts of the body while in the water, he does not need to wash his hands, and he may recite Berachot without washing, even while in the water. (Incidentally, Hacham Ovadia ruled that one may not recite a Beracha in a Mikveh, because the steam renders this an unclean area. He thus maintained that women who immerse in a Mikveh should recite the Beracha over the immersion in the outer room and then go into the Mikveh for immersion.) The exception to this rule is the case of one who touched his feet immediately after bathing. Washing after touching feet is required due to impurity, irrespective of the concern for cleanliness, and so one who touches his feet must wash his hands even if the feet were perfectly clean. Summary: As a general rule, one must wash his hands after touching a part of the body which is normally covered, but if this happened right after he bathed, when his body was perfectly clean, he is not required to wash his hands. However, one who touched his feet must wash his hands even if he had just bathed.