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Our Bodies, Ourselves
Netty C. Gross
PHOTO BY ESTEBAN ALTERMAN 'THE TIME HAD TO COME FOR WOMEN TO TAKE OVER': One of the trainee halakhic advisers |
At Limmud, British Jewry�s annual learning conference on the campus of Nottingham University, dozens of mainly non-Orthodox participants are sitting in a wood-paneled room awaiting a women-only lecture, breezily entitled �Mikvah and All That,� on laws pertaining to the ritual bath.
The lecturer, Sarah Harris, a cheerful, head-covered Orthodox mother of three, begins with the caution that the session will be limited to the technical aspects of niddah � the state of menstrual impurity that ends with immersion in the mikvah, a stepped bath filled with rain or spring water. She won't, she warns, be drawn into a debate on the pros and cons of observing niddah.
The warning points to a problem. Niddah and mikvah, once centerpieces of religious observance and identity, now seem downright bizarre to many Jews � if they are familiar with the subject at all. Two references in Leviticus (15:19 and 18:19), warning against having sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman, became the basis for extensive rabbinic exegesis and halakhic rule-making. Those rules remain an essential part of Orthodoxy, but disappeared from the consciousness of most Jewish women after Reform dropped the practice and Conservative Judaism made it optional.
But in recent years the mikvah experience has been repackaged as a New Age expression of female spirituality and, increasingly, non-Orthodox women are drawn to the concept. The Limmud audience, though largely clueless, is sympathetic. Still, Harris knows that what she's about to tell them could sound, frankly, strange. Observance requires a measure of faith.
Cheeks flushed with nervousness, she opens by explaining that a woman becomes a niddah at the onset of menstruation. For the next 12 or 13 days, and until she immerses herself in the mikvah, there should be no physical contact with her husband. On the evening of the fifth day, presuming that her blood flow has stopped, Harris goes on, the woman starts to count seven �clean� days, during which she must sleep on white sheets and wear white underwear. Twice a day, she must administer internal checks, swabbing herself with a special white cloth (sold at the mikvah) to ensure there's been no further menstrual bleeding.
On the night of the seventh clean day, the woman undergoes an elaborate cleansing process and then, under the supervision of a mikvah attendant, immerses herself in the purifying waters. Marital relations resume that evening and the reunion, Harris assures her audience, is both spiritually and physically �rewarding.� If the �clean� days are interrupted by signs of menstrual blood, however, the entire seven-day count must begin again.
Matters get complicated if the cloth, or anything else, is stained with ambiguous discharges. This requires a consultation with a rabbinical authority, to determine � depending on the stain's location, size and hue � whether the origin is menstrual.
Harris insists that there's nothing to be ashamed of, that rabbis are well versed in the subject, and that their expertise is vital to ensure that a woman does not sinfully immerse herself prematurely or, conversely, that couples are not needlessly kept apart. And, she stresses, the evidence can be discretely conveyed to the rabbi, perhaps via the woman's husband, or the rabbi's wife.
At the session's end, several of the non-Orthodox women in the audience say that they find the idea of marital separation, followed by reunion after immersion in the mikvah's waters, appealing � but not so the checking procedures. The daily self-scrutiny, says one, suggests a surrender of autonomy over one's body. Much more distressing, though, several chorus, is the thought of turning to a male rabbi concerning such intimate matters.
They're not alone: Many Orthodox women share their distress. Turning to rabbis with questions on family purity, many Orthodox women privately say, seems to contradict the high value which Judaism places on modesty. For those who have questions but cannot face the rabbis, observance of mikvah ritual can cause extended physical separation in their marriages.
BUT NOW ALL THAT IS START-ing to change. In what some regard as the boldest current innovation in Orthodoxy, a small but growing group of women are being trained and authorized to serve as �halakhic advisers,� assisting with niddah-related problems, removing the need for a rabbi's involvement. Nine such experts have recently begun work in Israel, and 15 more women are enrolled in the two-year training course; there is no such initiative in the Diaspora to date. �Frank-ly,� says one of the nine, Shani Taragin, �we can render a more accurate halakhic judgment. With the rabbis, women are either not present or are reluctant to share personal details which could influence a halakhic decision. With us, they don't hesitate.�
A few weeks ago, Gilah Katsav, wife of Israel�s president,
made the ceremonial first call to a nightly hotline (972-2-642-9801) staffed by the female advisers for women around the world. The response to the new service, says Taragin, has been �overwhelming. Callers are so relieved to be able to talk to a woman.�
Crucially, and unprecedentedly, the advisers' program has the support of at least parts of the Orthodox establishment, hitherto adamant in preventing women from acting as halakhic authorities in any way. Indeed, a half-dozen Orthodox rabbis, some of them yeshivah heads, are deeply involved in the training program.
This support stems, in part, from the willingness of the advisers � all of whom are Orthodox, married and don head coverings � to maintain a low profile. They are not, they insist, feminists, heaven forbid. They do not wish to expand their authority to areas such as Shabbat and kashrut. They have no desire to take the revolution a stage further and push to become Orthodox rabbis; indeed, one Orthodox woman in Jerusalem who is studying for the rabbinate with a maverick Orthodox rabbi was rejected by the course. Declares adviser Nomi Englard Shaffer, 43, a Jewish studies teacher from the Modi'in area: �What's important here is helping women on issues of niddah. Nothing else.�
And yet, there's no denying the program's ramifications in the ongoing debate on feminism in Orthodoxy. While mikvah observance may be about women's bodies, it is men who have been the sole authorities. That women have turned to rabbis with questions about their sexual and reproductive organs has implied submission to patriarchal control. The advent of the female advisers is a major stride toward female Orthodox empowerment � as the advisers, privately, acknowledge.
And the change is beginning to spread: Just weeks ago, Taragin, who lives at the settlement of Alon Shvut and serves as the official female halakhic adviser for neighboring Efrat, was asked by the town's Rabbi Shlomo Riskin to sit on the hitherto all male Efrat Religious Council. The council also took it upon itself to pay Taragin's salary.
THE PROGRAM IS THE BRAINchild of Chana Henkin, a mother of five who is the dean of Nishmat, an eleven-year old women's yeshivah in Jerusalem's Orthodox neighborhood of Bayit Vegan. Henkin's husband, Yehudah, is a rabbi with expertise in the field of niddah and a halakhic authority at his wife's yeshivah; Rabbi Yaakov Warhaftig, son of long-time National Religious Party politician Zerah Warhaftig, is dean of the institute that trains the advisers.
Henkin says the program was her response to witnessing the �horrendous suffering of women who were ashamed to ask my husband for help. Women who frequently stained would abstain from going to the mikvah for months, creating terrible tensions within their marriages.� And the widespread use of fertility treatments that can frequently put a woman in a state of niddah, as well as a new generation of intrauterine devices that can cause bleeding, have only exacerbated the need for halakhic guidance.
�The time had come,� she declares, �for women with knowledge of Torah and Talmud � and with the women's Torah-learning movement in its second decade, we have a growing number of them � to take over in this area.�
The trainee advisers undergo approximately 1,000 hours of study of religious texts, including the Talmudic tractate �Niddah,� the Shulkhan Arukh and modern rabbinic responsa. There are also lectures by gynecologists, sexologists, psychologists and other health professionals � in contrast to the training of Orthodox rabbis who, at ordination, are not required to have even basic knowledge of human biology. To graduate, the women must pass a four-hour exam administered by a panel of Orthodox rabbis. The project is funded, at an annual $500,000, by the privately backed Nishmat, which also pays the advisers a part-time salary.
Not all rabbis are happy. Niddah is no less central to an observant life than Shabbat, kashrut, Yom Kippur and Pesah. If women can rule on niddah, haven't they, semantics aside, effectively become rabbis?
The Orthodox establishment is, naturally, of at least two minds. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron backs the program; his Ashkenazi counterpart Yis-rael Meir Lau is privately supportive but publicly mum, and the Chief Rabbinate has refused to offer any funding. Mordechai Eliyahu, a former Sephardi chief rabbi and the author of a definitive tome on niddah, is said to oppose the program. And while Henkin says she has received �tacit approval� from a wide range of rabbis, including some leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community, she won't name names.
Henkin is also said to have drawn some private fire from the influential, though hardline conservative, cadre of Orthodox rabbis who hold sway at New York's Yeshivah University's rabbinic institute. These rabbis have always feared that the women's learning movement would eventually produce a taste for power. They are said to see Henkin's program, however logical and well-meaning, as proof that it has.
�There will always be someone who doesn't agree. That's life,� says Henkin who is now working on two new Nishmat programs � teaching niddah and mikvah laws to 85 HMO gynecologists and obstetricians, to raise their awareness of Orthodox sensitivities, and training counselors to teach family purity laws to secular brides. �The situation had become intolerable,� she declares. �We're changing it.�
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