Last time, we saw the basics of what we call hilchot niddah, despite longstanding practice of the Jewish people having women act according to the rules for a zavah gedolah any time they bleed menstrually, wait seven days without any sightings of blood before they go to mikveh and restore their marriage to its usual footing.
Ketamim
Where a woman has a ketem, a blood-colored stain on clothing or some other object, she would have to start or restart a count of seven “clean” days, according to a Mishnah on Niddah 52b. Later in the siman, AH includes an important limitation on ketamim, they must appear on a davar ha-mekabel tum’ah, an item or object susceptible to various statuses that keep people from contact with matters of Temple-related kedushah, sanctity.
For example, toilet paper is not makabel tum’ah—were it to come into contact with a person who had passed away, its halachic status would not change, so a ketem on toilet paper does not require a woman to treat herself as a niddah. The bedikah cloths women check themselves with while niddot are specifically made to be of a material and a size halachah saw as the minimum to be considered possible clothing (really, possible patches for a piece of clothing).
To become what we call a niddah, which is really a possible zavah, Rambam held she would need a stain large enough to have been formed by three occasions of bleeding, or three separate stains, on a garment she wore three days in a row (or if there was a stain each on three pieces of clothing she wore in that time).
Just one ketem is enough to stop her count if she was already a zavah, and for us to worry about what time period of her cycle she is in, to worry she might be a niddah rather than a zavah, and should would have to go through a whole series of checks, not see blood for long enough for us to be sure she was back to regular niddah (we don’t do any of this today, nor have we since the time of the Gemara, another example of AH telling us what we didn’t need given our current practice).
I’m skipping to se’if forty-two, because AH takes us through all the calculations it takes for a woman to return to her knowing where she is in her cycle, whether in a period of niddah or zivah, etc. For us, it doesn’t matter, as se’if forty-two will tell us.
Is Safe Ignorance Bliss?
[Ponder this: what are the disadvantages of a system that flattens out these distinctions? I know the advantages, they make it easier to follow, to be sure we not inadvertently violate rules of the Torah, in terms of a couple having marital relations when they should not. But the Torah knew how to make blanket rules if it wanted, yet it seems to have wanted to separate the two. What have we lost in our current system?
I don’t mean the extra stringencies and their costs, the many more times couples cannot foster their marital intimacy; that’s too obvious, although, as a reader pointed out to me, a cost a passage in Bava Metzi’a thought significant enough to bemoan those who kept a certain rabbi from the study hall, where he knew how to be lenient on these questions.
I meant more theologically: what do we lose when we make ourselves safe against a transgression by wiping it out of our awareness? Here’s another current example: Many neighborhoods have eruvim, for convenience and also to protect Jews from violating Shabbat by carrying. A generous and valuable instinct; is there any downside to Jews’ largely forgetting the prohibition?]
“Today’s” Practice
Only in sei’f forty-two does AH concede none of his lengthy discourse applies to our times, because “after the hearts were reduced, and Jews scattered to the four corners of the earth,” Jewish women realized they struggled to keep track, and took on the practice I brought up last time, to react to any blood as if they had become zavot gedolot, needed seven bloodless days before mikveh.
AH says he chose to explain the original rules mishum yagdil Torah ve-ya’adir, from Yeshayah 42;21, a phrase used to mean Hashem gives us lots of Torah to afford us opportunities for study and reward. He seems to mean he wanted us to have the chance to know “real” Torah law, as Rambam did as well.
[I don’t think he’s being fully transparent. First, the Talmud knew this practice of Jewish women. Jews had been exiled, sure, and their fears of getting it wrong show their hearts had been
