Coming Clean: Niddah as a Strategy for Healing and Self-Care

by Leah Ari Ruzkowski

דַּבֵּר אֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לֵאמֹר אִשָּׁה כִּי תַזְרִיעַ וְיָלְדָה זָכָר וְטָמְאָה שִׁבְעַת יָמִים כִּימֵי נִדַּת דְּוֺתָהּ תִּטְמָא׃ 

Tell the Children of Israel, “When a woman produces seed and births a son she is unfit for seven days, like the days of her menstrual period she shall remain unfit,” Leviticus 12:2

וּשְׁלֹשִׁים יוֹם וּשְׁלֹשֶׁת יָמִים תֵּשֵׁב בִּדְמֵי טׇהֳרָה בְּכׇל־קֹדֶשׁ לֹא־תִגָּע וְאֶל־הַמִּקְדָּשׁ לֹא תָבֹא עַד־מְלֹאת יְמֵי טׇהֳרָהּ׃

For thirty-three days she is to stay in her period of blood purification; she is not to touch anything holy, nor enter any holy place until the fulfilling of the days of her purification. 12:4

וְאִם־נְקֵבָה תֵלֵד וְטָמְאָה שְׁבֻעַיִם כְּנִדָּתָהּ וְשִׁשִּׁים יוֹם וְשֵׁשֶׁת יָמִים תֵּשֵׁב עַל־דְּמֵי טׇהֳרָה׃ 

If she bears a daughter she is unfit for two-weeks, as with her menstrual period; 
and for sixty days and six days she is to stay for blood purification. Leviticus 12:5

וְאִשָּׁה כִּי־תִהְיֶה זָבָה דָּם יִהְיֶה זֹבָהּ בִּבְשָׂרָהּ שִׁבְעַת יָמִים תִּהְיֶה בְנִדָּתָהּ וְכׇל־הַנֹּגֵעַ בָּהּ יִטְמָא עַד־הָעָרֶב׃

A woman that experiences discharge, which is blood from her “flesh,”  shall she remain in menstrual separation for seven day. Anyone who touches her is unfit until sunset. Leviticus 15:19

וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר תִּשְׁכַּב עָלָיו בְּנִדָּתָהּ יִטְמָא וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר־תֵּשֵׁב עָלָיו יִטְמָא׃ 

Anything that she lies upon during her menstrual period is unfit, anything that she sits upon becomes unfit. Leviticus 15:20

אִם־טָהֲרָה מִזּוֹבָהּ וְסָפְרָה לָּהּ שִׁבְעַת יָמִים וְאַחַר תִּטְהָר׃ 

Now when she is purified from her flow, she is to number seven days, and afterward, she becomes pure. Leviticus 15:29

וּבַיּוֹם הַשְּׁמִינִי תִּקַּח־לָהּ שְׁתֵּי תֹרִים אוֹ שְׁנֵי בְּנֵי יוֹנָה וְהֵבִיאָה אוֹתָם אֶל־הַכֹּהֵן אֶל־פֶּתַח אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד׃ 

And on the eighth day she is to take herself two turtledoves or two young pigeons 
and is to bring them to the priest, to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. Leviticus 15:30

וְעָשָׂה הַכֹּהֵן אֶת־הָאֶחָד חַטָּאת וְאֶת־הָאֶחָד עֹלָה וְכִפֶּר עָלֶיהָ הַכֹּהֵן לִפְנֵי יְהֹוָה מִזּוֹב טֻמְאָתָהּ׃ 

The priest is to make the one as a sin-offering and the other as an elevation-offering; 
thus the priest is to purify her before the presence of YHWH, from her menstrual discharge. Leviticus 15:31

I unironically love Parashat Tazria-Metsora. In fact, it may be one of my favorite Torah portions, and I look forward to studying every year, but I didn’t always feel that way. In fact, my first reading of this double portion left me feeling angry and ashamed. Unlike most of the other examples of sexism in the Torah, prescribing the forced segregation of new mothers and menstruants felt deeply personal. My menstrual cycle has always defied over-the-counter countermeasures and stunned medical professionals, featuring a very early onset and a short cycle with prolonged and very heavy bleeding, extreme pain, and digestive issues. To make matters worse, the typically progressive women in my very secular family were unified in their opinion that periods were inherently shameful and awful, that mine were no more awful than anyone else’s, and even if they were it was my fault for being born a girl. So reading that my Maker also seemed to think that my period rendered me contagiously polluted only served to underscore the antagonistic relationship I had developed with my post-pubescent body, and I resolved not to think about Leviticus 12:1-15:33 again. But if I wanted to make Torah study a regular practice, avoiding Tazria-Metsora would be impossible, and after several more readings I realized I needed to develop better strategies for unpacking problematic passages. Learning about commentators like Rashi and Ibn Ezra, I was comforted to know that I wasn’t alone in finding the text of the Torah challenging. Moreover, I discovered that the rabbis of the Talmud were perturbed by many of the same passages I was. Naturally, the next time Tazria-Metsora came around, I hoped to find something meaningful I could latch onto, that wouldn’t make me even more estranged from my body. My go-to commentators, however, were either preoccupied with technical or formal irregularities in the Hebrew or demonstrably false pronouncements about basic biology. Neither approach seemed especially helpful, nor did my brief foray into Tractate Niddah, which is devoted to hashing out the halakha of what is often euphemistically referred to as “the laws of family purity.”  If Rambam’s medical opinion was laughable, the rabbinic discourse in the Babylonian Talmud was even worse.

My next encounter with Tazria-Metsora was outside of weekly parashah cycle, and was my first experience of what I’ve come to think of as practical Torah study – that is, studying text in response to lived events rather than calendrical ones. I’d just had a miscarriage, and even though the pregnancy had been unplanned, unwanted, and too advanced for a legal abortion in my state, I was feeling deeply ambivalent. My friends were slightly appalled that I was anything less than elated by my miraculous luck, and my then-partner was furious that I wasn’t devastated by the loss and keen to try again. Desperate for someone to help me make sense of it all, I finally reached out to one of the rabbis at our synagogue. After thoughtfully listening while I related my dilemma, she handed me a Rashi Chumash, and invited me to open to Leviticus 12:2 and read Rashi’s second line of commentary:

כי תזריע. לְרַבּוֹת שֶׁאֲפִלּוּ יְלָדַתּוּ מָחוּי — שֶׁנִּמְחָה וְנַעֲשָׂה כְּעֵין זֶרַע — אִמּוֹ טְמֵאָה לֵידָה (נדה כ"ז):  

כי ילדה — These words are superfluous, would suffice — they mean literally, ”if she bringeth forth seed” and are employed to include the case that if she gave birth to him (the male child) as a pulpy mass which had dissolved, having become liquified like seed, even then its mother becomes unclean as though it were a normal birth (Niddah 27b).

Her point, she explained, is that while Rashi’s biology may have been bunk, his central argument was ultimately spiritual, not scientific. Given how advanced the pregnancy had been, hormonally and halakhically speaking my grief was both understandable and appropriate. I told her that I thought the Torah was cruel for stigmatizing people like me, and she acknowledged that to modern readers the language of a lot of the mitzvot in Leviticus can sound harsh. But, she reminded me, that doesn’t necessarily mean that these mitzvot are supposed to make us feel shame. She suggested that they might instead be a reminder that in certain circumstances we need to be gentle with ourselves and present with our bodies as they are, especially when we wish they were different. That biological functions can be “normal” and also profoundly disruptive, even disabling, and that we should honor that fact. But before I could take any of that in, I needed more clarity on this whole purity business.

The Hebrew word in question here, /טמאtameh, is rather difficult for modern Western readers to understand in its original cultural context. Situated within a social framework that evolved out of Christian imperialism, we tend to ascribe moral subtext to terms like cleanliness and purity. Even nominally health-related concerns about hygiene can unfortunately devolve into judgmental shaming. But from the Torah’s perspective, designating a person or thing /טמאtameh only matters insofar as Temple sacrifice is concerned. It’s a question of cleanliness or contamination more akin to industrial processes or scientific research than social mores or sexual ethics. With that in mind, I started to think about the Holy Temple as the biblical equivalent of a nuclear reactor: the site of a series of very finicky and powerful processes with the potential to cause catastrophic damage if even the tiniest contaminant or slightest deviation in standard operating procedure were to be introduced. In that framework, being deemed /טמאtameh was less a referendum on my worthiness as a person and more an assessment of my capacity at any given time. And if I was being honest with myself, my period was rendering me completely incapable of succeeding in an environment where there was so little room for error. Eventually, I was tentatively diagnosed with endometriosis and adenomyosis, although a formal diagnosis could only be confirmed surgically. Nevertheless, the validation that came with diagnosis gave me the fuel I needed to improve my quality of life however I could. I moved to a major city in a different time zone. I made new friends. I completely switched career fields. I got a dog, and some houseplants, and a cute apartment near the lake. My menstrual cycle, however, refused to get with the program. For three weeks out of the month I was afraid to make social plans that involved leaving the house for fear of bleeding through my clothes. I had to alter my weekday commute to accommodate persistent nausea and vomiting. I missed work a lot, and lost jobs when I ran out of PTO or short term disability leave. In spite of all the good things in my life, my periods were so debilitating that I started to struggle with feelings of hopelessness and despair.

Fortunately, I knew from past experience that the most reliable way for me to navigate these feelings was to lean in to Jewish practice. It seemed as good a time as any to revisit Tazria-Metsora and  נדה/niddah,the practice of segregating a person who becomes /טמאtameh through menstruation or childbirth. In this read through, the first thing I noticed is that everything we know about נדה/niddah comes from the perspective of Aaron and the Levitical priests. As the individuals most proximate to the Holy Temple, it makes sense that the priests would want to ensure that they were able to keep maximal distance between themselves and anything טמא/tameh. Hence the harsh tone and exacting detail. But I wondered if Miriam and the Israelite women viewed נדה/niddah as an expulsion or a reprieve. After all, we know from archeological evidence and non-biblical literary sources that the lives of ancient Levantine women were filled with grueling physical labor and were centered around caring for others. Maybe, as Anita Diamant has suggested in her novel The Red Tent, נדה/niddah was an opportunity for women to focus on their own needs during a period of physical duress.

I tried to adjust my attitude towards menstruation accordingly, and to follow my rabbi’s long-ago advice to be gentle with myself and center my bodily needs while my reproductive system staged an armed insurrection. Realizing I had no idea how to do either, I looked to Tazria-Metsora for a place to start. The Hebrew text of this double-portion is straightforward but somewhat lacking in detail, aside from the repeatedly stressed equivalency between menstruum, afterbirth, semen, and all other bodily emissions. Unsurprisingly, there is a large body of halakhic literature to fill in the gaps, and I decided that wading through it was a worthwhile distraction while I waited for my health insurance company to provide prior authorization for the hysterectomy my doctors insisted was medically necessary. Starting with the most confronting detail in the text, I first read commentary on Lev. 12:6 to better understand why menstruation and childbirth merit a sin offering. Ibn Ezra explains that this serves as restitution for anything unseemly that may have been uttered in response to extreme pain or physical duress, which I found utterly relatable. Ibn Ezra led me back to Maimonides, and his framing of menses as “an affliction upon woman even though it is in her nature to experience it regularly” (Lev. 12:2:2) helped me recontextualize my period as a chronic condition that needed to be managed rather than fought. This in turn helped dispel much of the tension and emotional distress that usually accompanied it. Finally, a closer reading of Tractate Niddah revealed that the halakha of נדה/niddahwas much more nuanced than I remembered, and often contradictory. The sages of the Talmud introduced a number of leniencies as they explicated Torah law, many of which were concerned with preserving the sexual intimacy between a married couple (see, for example, BT Niddah 12a) or the physical health and safety of the נדה/niddah (BT Niddah 67b). Some rabbis even seemed concerned with minimizing the disruption on daily life (see M Niddah 8). And while it is true that the halakhic literature stresses the importance of separating the נדה/niddah from everyone else, it also emphasizes a smooth transition back to normative relations once menstruation or post-partum recovery has ended.

Whereas I had once been appalled by the body shame that Tazria-Metsora seemed to endorse and the shoddy science and sexist behavior it seemed to inspire, I was starting to feel seen and held by it. After all, if I set aside the problematic features it shares with all ancient texts, what remained was body of behavioral practices that attempted to accommodate both the normative and afflicting nature of menstruation, often with more thought and care for the whole person than contemporary culture affords. Tazria-Metsora and the commentary on it inspired me to cultivate a נדה/niddah practice that in turn offered me a different way of relating to my body. Instead of being frustrated by its limitations and ashamed of its emissions, I try to remind myself that my body is a gift, even if I find it a tad disappointing or unpleasant sometimes. I try to notice when I’m feeling at 75% capacity, and to prioritize my comfort and wellbeing accordingly. And when I start feeling like my old self again, I try not to dwell on missed opportunities or worry about when I’m going to feel worse again. In an unexpected bonus, my experience of wrestling with the halakha of נדה/niddah and the text of Tazria-Metsora also provided me with a template for relating to ancient Jewish texts that rankle my contemporary sensibilities, which I now use on a regular basis. Which process in turn has changed the way I relate to myself and the world around me, which often changes the way I approach our sacred, ancient texts. Which is probably why it’s my favorite Torah portion – because returning to it again and again has given me so much, and continues to be a transformative experience.

Leah Ari was born and raised secular in working-class eastern Kentucky, and holds a BA in Classics from Smith College, where zhe was awarded highest honors for hir analysis of the interplay between identity and the built environment in Second Temple Period Rome; and a MA in Interfaith Leadership from Gratz College, specializing in Judeo-Christian relations. Zhe is currently pursuing rabbinical ordination at Hebrew Seminary for the Deaf and Hearing, and has recently been admitted into the inaugural cohort of Gratz’s PhD in Jewish Studies. Zhe currently resides in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood with hir partner, Joe, and their menagerie. Outside the beit midrash, Leah can usually be found at the Art Institute of Chicago, biking the Lakefront Trail, or knitting in a sunbeam. Queer and disabled, zhe held roles in the defense, financial technology, and interior design prior to becoming religious, and now hopes to use hir lived experience and learning to make Judaism more accessible to underserved communities.