Note: This paper was initially published as my anthropology capstone project at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Section 1: Introduction
For this project I will be examining the relevance of niddah laws (sometimes called Family Purity Laws) to the lives of contemporary Modern Orthodox Jewish women. Niddah laws relate to marital conduct between a husband and wife, specifically during the time the wife is menstruating and seven days after when she is considered niddah, a specific type of impurity caused by menstruation. During this time, the couple is forbidden from engaging in many aspects of their relationship, particularly physical ones as they are forbidden from intercourse, touching, or sharing a bed. After the niddah period, the wife must immerse in a mikveh (a ritual bath) and become tahara (pure) again and the couple may resume normal marital relations. This research seeks to understand in what ways and for what reasons these laws are still upheld by modern women as well deconstructing some common tropes regarding niddah held by Jews and non-Jews alike. Niddah is a very private practice, so a fair amount of this research seeks to shed light on how it is observed in general. The main focuses of this research are my initial working hypothesis on embodied conceptions of purity, and why that analysis is ultimately ineffective with regards to modern niddah observance. I will describe why I switched focus to a discourse and negotiation lens. My subsequent working question was understanding how and why contemporary women observe (or at times do not observe) these laws in whole or part and how they explain these choices. Tied into this question was the important element of if and how niddah observance can be enforced and the effectiveness of those structures which seek to enforce it. This juxtaposes the secretive and taboo nature of these laws, leading to complex negotiations of who is permitted or comfortable enough to say what and to whom, as well as some women’s desires for increased openness. Lastly, I examine tropes or frequently repeated answers which can indicate that a question received a less genuine and more culturally constructed answer. Analysing these tropes became a key part of my research.
Section 2: Theoretical Approach
Niddah is a Hebrew word which refers to the period when a woman is menstruating divided into unclean days (the time she is bleeding, with a minimum of five days for Ashkenazi Jews from Northern and Eastern Europe and four days for Sephardi Jews from Southern Europe and North Africa) and seven clean days following that period. During the seven days a woman must check internally with a white cotton cloth and if she sees any spots of blood, begin her count of the clean days again. The Hebrew word for law and jurisprudence is halacha so these laws are sometimes referred to as hilchot niddah. The term mitzvah or commandment is also used synonymously with halacha throughout interview excerpts and much of this paper (the term has slightly more positive and less legalistic implications). In English the laws related to niddah are sometimes translated as Family Purity Laws (taraharat mishpacha in Hebrew). Throughout this paper I refrain from using that terminology as many participants indicated that the phrase did not accurately represent what the laws of niddah are and instead suggested negative stereotypes about women being impure or dirty while they were menstruating and in niddah. The word kallah means bride, and kallah teachers are the women (traditionally Rebbetzins or Rabbi’s wives) who teach niddah laws to a woman during her engagement, the first time a woman will learn these laws in detail.
My initial approach intended to use a phenomenological perspective to examine experiences of niddah and its effects on women who practice it. I was hoping to examine the meaning derived from the embodied practice of ritual acts. My guiding theory relied on Mary Douglas (2002) who wrote perhaps the seminal work on purity, Purity and Danger where she argues for a coherent system of purity and taboos within each culture and analyzes these systems and their deeper meanings, namely how they coincide with moral concerns and general anxieties. According to her “all margins are dangerous […] the orifices of the body […] symbolize its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind.” (p. 150) For this reason, fluids which cross the tenuous margin of the body are often taboo. Menstrual blood is further associated with birth and death and therefore has many taboos across cultures. My idea was to study how notions of their own impurity effected women’s experiences of the laws and overall self-esteem. I anticipated that women would show more negative self-conception, particularly during the period of niddah, and that might even indicate wider gender inequality and negative conceptions of women. However, these results were not evident in my interviews. This is due in part to the nature of information which can be uncovered in interviews. However, I also will discuss some alternate theories of purity interpretation which might explain the disparity, such as a ritual versus moral impurity distinction proposed by Michael Rosenberg (2014) and an overall deemphasis on the religious body in response to the advent of the medical body in the modern post-industrial period as suggested by Isobel-Marie Johnston (2015).
It quickly became clear that interviews by their very nature were limited in their ability to address embodied experiences and the roots of cultural belief. Questions often resulted in trope-like answers which are constructed within the frame of culture. It is difficult to deeply analyze culture through only discussion as many of its effects do not occur at a conscious level. Understand the deeper meanings of niddah would require far more extensive interviews in conjunction with a broader ethnography which is beyond the scale of this project. Considering this, I changed much of my approach to consider discourse analysis and tropes regarding the justification and navigation of following or not following niddah laws. Critical discourse analysis looks at the ways people talk and analyzes elements such as how people choose to describe and discuss (or not discuss) things (Johnstone, 2018). I also used some hermeneutics of text and discourse, looking at various interpretations of the Torah, niddah practice guidebooks, and my interview responses. I compared the varying interpretations I received to understand how different meanings were derived from the exact same commandment.
I focused on how women discussed their experiences, choice of words being very important. Analyzing when they spoke of their own practice as opposed to broader “correct” practice was key to identifying tropes of niddah. Many women had strong associations of what should be done, regardless of what practices they actually followed. Most felt they were falling short of this ideal practice and displayed justifications and struggles with regards to that disparity. Women’s mundane descriptions of how they practiced were also very illuminating. I noted positive, negative, and neutral associations with various topics to understand the wider associations women formed regarding their niddah practices.
I initially intended to do generational comparison based on a hypothesis that younger women would overall show less adherence or a more negotiated adherence. However this hypothesis did not prove true, perhaps due to the rather small sample size and the few differences between generations. Women across all age groups showed levels of non-adherence and negotiation with regards to their adherence. Due to these results, I primarily did analysis of individual cases and general trends, bringing up generational differences only in the few instances where it was relevant.
Section 3: Literature Review
3A: Purity
Rosenberg (2014) does an analysis of how biblical literature characterizes menstrual impurity, leaning on the work of Mary Douglas to interpret the meaning of purity. He examines the possibility that ritual impurity, of the kind acquired by a menstruating woman, is distinct from moral impurity, the kind acquired by doing sins. Specifically ritual impurity is transferable because it is related to physical circumstances such as contact with a dead body or menstruation, paralleling the types of bodily impurity and taboo Mary Douglas analyzes. Moral impurity is not transferable since it is acquired by a specific individual due to immoral behaviors. If the two are distinct it would imply that women who are niddah are not considered immoral or sinful, while an overlap in these categories might suggest more negative connotations to being niddah. Secunda (2012) similarly brings biblical sources indicating that menstruation (and accompanying niddah) within Judaism was not considered a punishment for Eve’s sin of eating from the tree of knowledge until the rabbinical period when these associations begin to occasionally appear. However, Naomi Marmon and Tova Hartman (2004) found that women in their study did not generally consider aspects of defilement potentially related to being impure while menstruating. According to them, women “did not see themselves as second-class citizens being segregated […] nor does observance provoke feelings of degradation or shame.” (p. 405) These conclusions match my own. However, there is still room for further inquiry into how niddah women perceive themselves and whether considering oneself “impure” affects self-esteem and ideas of sinfulness in menstruating women.
3B: Motivation and Negotiation
Niza Yanay and Tamar Rapoport (1997) examine different introductory manuals intended to explain to Jewish women in Israel how to observe niddah laws properly in order to study discourses surrounding the practice. They note niddah practices are often presented as an alternative to the destructive power of secularism. Pamphlets “claim that sexual permissiveness has led to the disintegration of family life, and that abandonment of the religious lifestyle has led to the deterioration of Man” (p. 653) while upholding niddah laws will restore these missing virtues.
Oprah, in a 2012 episode of her show, Oprah’s New Chapter, enters a Hassidic Ultra-Orthodox community and interviews the women there about a range of subjects including niddah and is often surprised by the empowerment women feel as the akeret habayit (foundation of the house). For example, the lack of physical contact during a woman’s niddah period which she initially views as a negative, many women describe as a benefit which allows them to focus on the emotional connection between a husband and wife. Hartman and Marmon (2004) address the complimentary commandment of onah, a woman’s conjugal rights within marriage which charge a husband with keeping his wife happy and fulfilled. One way the law is often interpreted is an obligation for the couple to have sex after a woman’s niddah period is ended by her immersion. Onah is particularly interesting in that it centers the woman’s pleasure (rather than the man’s or purely procreative purposes) as the goal of intercourse. (p. 402)
Johnston (2015) performed a particularly important examination of the history of niddah observance in North America, since most of the existing literature had studied Israel where Judaism is the majority religion and so such practices are much more common and supported by government infrastructure such as municipally maintained mikvehs. She examines the social drama of the apparent decline of niddah over the 20th century and seeks to complicate stereotypes about non-observance as a natural assimilation or secularization trend and instead looks at issues of mikveh accessibility and other issues. She highlights ways in which niddah laws are uniquely private and different methods of encouraging increased adherence and their effectiveness.
3C: Publicity and Control
Hartman and Marmon (2004) also note that since women privately determine when they are ready to immerse in the mikveh they have the ability to postpone their immersion and withhold sex within a religious framework. This can be highly empowering for women who wish not to have relations with their husbands but do not feel comfortable voicing this outright. While this is technically incorrect observance of niddah laws, they found several women who considered or performed this delay. (p. 403)
Yanay and Rapoport (1997) describe a conflicting discourse in instructional pamphlets on the topic. On the one hand, there is vagueness in these very private laws which women are the sole deciders of, potentially empowering woman in their practice. On the other hand, the pamphlets emphasize that in any cases of confusion a male rabbi must be consulted, reasserting a patriarchal hierarchy. (p. 657) Hartman and Marmon (2004) note the same paradox and in their interviews discover that some women choose to neglect rabbinic consultation out of desires for independence or even feelings of violation. One woman claimed that when she performs an internal check for blood, “I sometimes have this feeling that it is the long hands of the rabbis of hundreds of years literally entering my body to check me” (p. 396).
Section 4: Methodology
I conducted six semi-structured interviews with Modern Orthodox Jewish women who either currently or previously followed niddah laws. These women were divided into two younger women, aged 20-40 and four older women, aged 40+. Participants were collected by reaching out to family and community members who followed the laws through Facebook, text messages, emails, and snowball collection through word of mouth. In the end this yielded the six respondents interviewed. One potentially confounding variable is that all women in the older generation were South African born Jews who had immigrated to Israel or Canada during their adult lives. This means these results are not necessarily generalizable to the wider Canadian Jewish population without further research. However, they do make up a reasonable case study and lay the groundwork for future research into these topics.
Before beginning any interviews involving human participants, I submitted a proposal of my intended research and methods as well as an ethics report which was review by my supervisor, Dr. Stéphanie Walsh Matthews. Before each interview participants read through and signed a consent form allowing me to record their interviews and use the information learnt from them in this paper, with the clear understanding that consent was fully voluntary and could be withdrawn at any point.
I primarily asked questions to understand the experience of following niddah laws in participants’ own words. This revealed their knowledge, interpretations, and associations with the laws. Some examples of these questions were “Do you keep these laws?” “How do you keep these laws?” or “Please describe your process of preparing for and going to the mikveh.” By asking participants about their general process of following the laws, and the importance of those laws, they would reveal many mundane aspects of what niddah means to them and how it shapes their lives in supposedly trivial ways. These questions also served to reveal the tropes surrounding niddah laws through examination of certain questions which received rote and similar answers (which occasionally further conflicted with facts revealed throughout the rest of the interview) this was particularly prevalent when asking for negative side effects of keeping niddah. I also used hypotheticals to examine questions which might not apply to all individuals or which individuals may be uncomfortable revealing they had done, such as intentionally extending the count of their seven clean days to postpone sleeping with their husbands.
Section 5: Analysis
5A: Negotiation
Most women keep the rule against having sex (with the exception of one who gave up keeping the laws entirely in middle age), but only one keeps the additional rules of avoiding all physical contact. Women in both generations showed transitional journeys in their adherence throughout their lives. Two women described maintaining similar practice from the beginning to end of their marriages, but others decreased in strictness throughout their marriage. There were also two somewhat exceptional cases in the older generation of one woman who entirely stopped keeping the laws upon becoming angry with God and another who began following the laws halfway through her marriage to show her thankfulness to God. This reveals that following niddah laws is often seen as a more private and God-related or spiritual mitzvah than a public one.
Halachic infertility is the term for when following niddah laws causes a woman to become infertile because she ovulates during the seven clean days when she is required to abstain from marital relations. Halachic infertility is particularly interesting because there exists an entire term and discourse unique to this issue, indicating it must be relatively common. However, four of the six women interviewed had never heard of it. Only one had actually experienced halachic infertility and it represented a major factor in her choice to violate certain aspects of niddah as she chose to have sex during her ovulation period during the times when she and her husband were trying to conceive. It is often promoted for couples in this situation to turn to methods such as in-vitro fertilization but this woman rejected such practices as excessive and unnecessary.
5B: Publicity and Control
The issue with enforcing niddah laws is their private nature. As the laws are kept within the home between a husband and wife. They are quite secret, and practice is difficult to observe and monitor. Mikveh attendants are one potential avenue for monitoring these practices. These women work at the mikveh and observe women entering the ritual bath. My interviews revealed a wide array of duties expected from these women. In some cases, they would be described as checking a woman’s entire body to ensure she met the standards of cleanliness required to immerse herself, such as no loose hairs, makeup, or dirt of any kind on her body. The attendant then observed that the woman entered the water correctly by fully immersing, with no body parts above the water or touching the walls and floor. In the other extreme one woman revealed that the attendant is entirely optional in her mikveh and while she chooses to have the woman double check her back and serve as a witness, some women perform the immersion with absolutely no supervision. This level of variation complicates the role of mikveh attendants as enforcers. One interviewee argued that enforcement is key because “I think that standards are important, and I think that following the same rules is important. I don’t think we should all just be allowed to be laws unto ourselves,” comparing it to the laws of keeping a kosher home. Interestingly, Johnston (2015) specifically contrasts the laws of keeping kosher, which are very publicly observable, to the much more private niddah laws. One woman interviewed said “I don’t know why someone has to watch you, like if you’re doing it for you, is it not the honor system like everything else?” So even within those keeping niddah there are very different expectations of what makes these laws important and whether they should be communally visible and enforceable or entirely secret.
Another type of enforcement is that of Rabbis who are expected to check ambiguous spots a woman might find while counting her seven clean days and which she cannot determine on her own to definitively be blood (which would render her impure again and require a new count) or not blood (allowing her to continue her count). Three women interviewed do not consult a Rabbi with their questions and concerns. One woman, when asked, responded as though confronting the hypothetical Rabbi, “You can’t look at my dirty underwear, it’s gross and it’s disgusting.” Two women say they would be more comfortable asking questions of another woman as opposed to a male Rabbi. One says that in her area there already exist designated women who serve as intermediaries to Rabbis. Another mentions a movement of women known as yoetzet halachot who have studied the laws of niddah and are able to advise on minor issues and consult a Rabbi on a woman’s behalf with more major issues. Interestingly, two women in the older generation argued for the importance of consulting a Rabbi to gain more leniency as women are apparently harsher on themselves and may begin a new count unnecessarily, making them niddah for longer.
Women also derived different meanings from their responsibility with regards to upholding niddah laws. There is little oversight to a woman’s daily practice of niddah laws such as her count and checking for blood during her seven clean days which means the responsibility is on her. Husbands are not even involved in this process as they are not supposed to be intimate with their wives at this period and additionally about half the women interviewed described their husband’s understanding of niddah laws as significantly lower than their own. One woman decried the term Family Purity not due to its purity connotations but “because I don’t think it’s the responsibility of the family. I think it’s all on the woman … It’s female’s purity I don’t think there’s as many concerns about male purity” while another felt empowered by her responsibility, saying that her husband was not really involved in keeping the laws which “was nice actually, because it was my mitzvah.” This might also parallel spiritual connection with the practices as the first above respondent described mikveh immersion as entirely non-spiritual while the second reported feeling extremely spiritual. The level of privacy and control over following the laws seems to be related to overall satisfaction, with the two women who felt most coerced by societal expectations and oversight reporting that following niddah laws felt rote, routine, and chore-like.
5C: Tropes
Kallah teachers are often described in almost unrealistically glowing terms. “I took [classes] with some really amazing Rebbitzin, which is like a Rabbi’s wife, and she is extremely knowledgeable in this subject matter, and she teaches classes and all that. She’s wonderful.” This is indicative of the wider tropes of discourse surrounding niddah. The teacher who passes on the holy tradition is glorified, and the potential strictness of her direction is overlooked. In contrast, the Israeli series Love and Marriage in Orthodox Judaism (2018) shows a kallah teacher being quite overbearing and sharing outright misinformation. While she may be an extreme example it is important to note the lack of perfection to highlight the way such perfection is narratively constructed.
Similarly, when discussing the practices of niddah directly, only two woman would say that there were negative side effects to following the laws. However, over the course of the interview all revealed some struggles and drawbacks to following the laws. One showed a fair bit of resentment, saying that during times when she was not having periods and not going to the mikveh her relationship was:
The same or better because I think it’s gross to go to a bathtub of water that a hundred other people went in. I don’t think its spiritual at all, to me it’s a chore, like, so the less I have to go the better. Like I told my husband, “You should have to go every month. Like you go once before Yom Kippur. What the heck? Why do I have to go every single month?” Like, I don’t know. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Women also typically highlighted the exact same benefits to following these laws, those I had already read in an introductory book intended to encourage young couples to follow the laws. Keeping niddah laws supposedly improves marriages because the separation of the couple for about two weeks revitalizes their love and attraction. It makes a couple spend time without the option of physical intimacy, forcing them to speak to each other and engage in further emotional intimacy and also makes them value their physical relations when they have them. I received this same explanation from almost all participants which emphasizes to me that it is a trope. While this does not mean that they are entirely untrue, it does require further examination, especially in light of the downsides like the one above which contradict these tropes. Similarly, the one woman who started keeping niddah later in life pondered “did we suddenly start to talk more? I think not.”
5D: Secrecy
Niddah laws are highly secretive, taught only just before marriage and so many women had only vague ideas or misconceptions about the laws beforehand. Only one woman openly discussed niddah adherence within her friend group. She showed some of the highest confidence about her own non-adherence of certain aspects because her “friends that do keep it, keep it like [her].” In contrast the participant who showed the most anxiety about her practices mentioned never discussing her adherence with friends but often compared herself to a hypothetical better practitioner, implying that the lack of open conversation cemented the tropes of ideal practice as the norm within her mind, despite the reality. Understanding that the reality of practice is much lower adherence than this ideal, it is important to consider that a decrease of secrecy would not mean an increase in the types of control and enforcement discussed in section 5B but more likely a decrease in anxiety regarding adherence or strictness.
5E: Outside of Marriage
In their book Heavenly Sex, Westheimer and Mark (1995) indicate that some Orthodox women will follow niddah laws outside of marriage, if they do choose to have premarital sex. This suggestion was generally not supported by those interviewed who believed the laws were limited to marriage, and furthermore that trying to do a mitzvah while sinning was counter-intuitive, indicating an “all or nothing” approach. The interpretation of niddah as related to marriage may be based on an interpretation issue as the Torah discusses the impurity of sleeping with an isha who is impure (Leviticus 15:19). The Hebrew word isha translates both as woman and wife, making it unclear which the law refers to, although general condemnation of sex outside marriage within the Torah may imply these laws apply only to marriage (Johnston, 2015, p. 131). One woman did describe a friend who considered going to the mikveh after premarital sex. However, she was not especially religious and was considering immersion as an attempt to assuage her overall guilt for having premarital sex rather than careful consideration of the law.
Section 6: Discussion and Future Direction
One major outcome of my research was a serious reconsideration of whether purity is actually a factor in these “Family Purity Laws”. Women do not acknowledge the concept of purity, when I ask them if they consider the phrase purity to be accurate several say it is not, and even those who do rarely bring up purity at any other point. Perhaps purity was a factor in the initial practice, but it has become so obsolete that the tropes around following the laws are not serving to conceal it but become genuine reinterpretations. Johnston (2015, p. 56) referencing Mira Balberg, considers that a decline in the meaningfulness of menstruation and the menstruating body might be occurring within the modern world as a result of the Enlightenment notion of a neutral bio-medical body. This construction of the body makes menstruation a defined biological process and therefore demystifies it and makes it less religiously meaningful. One participant paralleled Mary Douglas’ analysis by describing Judaism as having “issues with bodily fluids, specifically blood, and dead bodies and, you know, liquid discharges from your body.” By using this phrasing, she distinguishes herself from that notion of Judaism, for her menstruation does not contain these spiritual dimensions, and she describes any discomfort she feels regarding menstruation as purely physical. One woman from the older generation claims that the focus on impurity and particularly its associations with dirtiness is a recent and external perspective to Judaism. This does indicate that there is currently a merging of the physical and spiritual categories and perhaps a similar merging of Rosenberg’s (2014) moral and ritual categories. However, anthropologists should be careful of adopting this perspective when a member of the culture specifically references it as a misinterpretation. An important area for further research is a serious examination of what exactly purity entails within a modern and Jewish concept and whether that notion accurately maps with niddah experiences or whether it really is kept primarily for other reasons, such as feelings of increased intimacy, in contemporary times.
My initial questions and framework of examining the embodied experience of following niddah and mikveh immersion have only become more salient in light of responses indicating both the spirituality and mundanity of mikveh immersion. One participant described her immersion as deeply spiritual, tying that into her overall enjoyment of swimming and being underwater, a physically embodied association. However, another participant described the mikveh as dirty, with concerns about germs related to having so many women immersing in the same water, this is despite the fact that women are required to undergo such strenuous cleaning beforehand. These comments do affirm the importance of thephysical immersion in the mikveh to the spirituality of the overall process, but there is definitely room for much deeper examination into the varying reactions to immersion and their root causes. An ethnographic survey into mikveh practices which involved some time spent at (or personally immersing in) the mikveh, interviewing participants comparatively before and after entering when the experience is fresh in their mind and interviews with mikveh attendants could all broaden understanding of the embodied experience. With more time and resources, I would have visited a mikveh in order to understand the atmosphere there and speak to attendants.
Section 7: Conclusion
Overall, academic understanding of niddah laws and other religious menstrual regulations is still a relatively new field and a rather delicate one due to the private natures of such practices. However, to understand religion, conceptions of the body, and gendered expectations it is important to study these practices. A major finding of my research was the nebulousness of purity as a concept and its frequent lack of applicability to these purity laws. Analysis of my interview results showed that women frequently do not adhere to the laws strictly and completely but instead are constantly negotiating their practice to fit with their level of religiosity, lifestyle, and self-conception. However, the taboo and secretive nature of these practices lead many women to believe that others are keeping the laws better than they are and lead to feelings of resentment, anxiety, or low self-esteem. Many women felt that they tended to have been too anxious about these laws, particularly early in marriage and would have encouraged their younger selves to relax. Niddah laws are also difficult to talk about because, as with many religious practices there are specific tropes about the benefits and effects of these practices. These tropes such as the incredible kallah teacher or the benefits of separation are deeply ingrained in the cultural psyche and come up throughout interviews, overriding an ability to acknowledge potential contradictions. However, understanding the importance of the tropes, how to work around them, and their truthful elements was key to gaining a comprehensive understanding of niddah. Overall, a key factor I observed in niddah laws was the constant negotiation of practice by individual women. More openness and acceptance of these personal negotiations is likely to benefit all practitioners.
Bibliography
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