“In addition to the biblical distinction between normal and abnormal discharges, the rabbis developed two more categories…”
Leviticus 15 is concerned with normal and abnormal, male and female genital discharges. As...
Tag Archives: Niddah
“The practice of waiting seven blood-free days following the end of a regular menstrual period is variously described in the Talmud as heḥemiru al atzman, minhaga, and halakhah pesukah, indicating that a variety of attitudes existed as to the severity of the requirement”
Zimmerman is correct in saying that a seven-day wait after any bleeding has become...
“…the term halakhah pesukah need not be considered the opposite of minhaga. It may simply mean a rule that cannot be questioned or supported on the basis of conventional talmudic dialectics”
Perhaps it can be argued that the ḥumra of the daughters of Israel is...
“The notion that the seven blood-free days are an undue stringency imposed by the Rabbis is a commonplace of contemporary halakhic discussion among liberal Orthodox and non-Orthodox feminist Jews who discuss the laws of nidah…”
The notion that the seven blood-free days are an undue stringency imposed by the...
“The family purity handbook shares the qualities of the other halakhic handbooks…, but it has a history of its own”
The family purity handbook shares the qualities of the other halakhic handbooks…, but it...
“…it is, I think, the biggest, the one most central to the debates within Orthodoxy today, and the most personal”
It is impossible to credit the claim that it doesn’t matter at all to...
“Should the menstrual prohibition be kept literally by Christians?”
Should the menstrual prohibition be kept literally by Christians? Medieval Christian authors often argued...
“Talking about the non-halakhic aspects of Taharat HaMishpacha should be another part of the healthy marriage toolkit”
No new bride should ever have to feel isolated and scared because of the...
There is no mention of bringing anything niddah-related to a rabbi in the Meam Loez
R. Moshe Maimon called my attention to the Meam Loez’s discussion of the laws of niddah, addressed to both men and women, and there is no mention there of bringing anything to the rabbi. This omission was rectified by R. Aryeh Kaplan, who in his translation (vol. 1, p. 136) adds: “When in doubt, a competent rabbi should be consulted.”
Marc B. Shapiro, “Answers to Quiz Questions and Other Comments, part 2”, The Seforim Blog (25 March 2012), n. 2 {http://seforim.blogspot.com/2012/03/answers-to-quiz-questions-and-other.html}
In Yemen and in some of the Sephardic world there was never a concept of asking a rabbi intimate niddah questions
I think many will find interesting that in Yemen and in some of the Sephardic world there was never a concept of asking a rabbi intimate niddah questions. This was because the women were embarrassed to do so, seeing it as “untzniusdik”. I mention this only because I have heard rabbis say that in truth there are no tzeniut issues with this, and women shouldn’t be embarrassed. They make it seem that it is only due to modern values that all of a sudden this sort of thing is uncomfortable for women. This is clearly not the case, as we see from what happened in the Yemenite and some of Sephardic worlds, hardly centers of modernity. (I am only speaking of the historical reality, not the wisdom of the Yemenite and Sephardic approaches, which usually meant that any doubt would be assumed to render the woman impure.)
Marc B. Shapiro, “Answers to Quiz Questions and Other Comments, part 2”, The Seforim Blog (25 March 2012), n. 2 {http://seforim.blogspot.com/2012/03/answers-to-quiz-questions-and-other.html}