Se’ifim 43 and 44 highlight two differences between a zavah and a zav, a woman and a man (aside from the glaringly obvious one that different substances lead to this status, blood for a woman, something similar to semen for a man). Verses reference her makor, womb, and blood flowing, without limit on the spur for the flow, on its own or because of an external event, such as a doctor’s examination.
[This last is practical today; online, you can find many articles about which gynecological procedures turn a woman into a niddah and which do not.]
A man’s zivah cannot be incurred because of circumstances beyond his control.
A woman’s zivah also starts when blood moves internally, even if it has not yet left the womb, where men must secrete the zivah substance before the status occurs. [This suggests/implies these halachot pay more attention to what happens inside a woman, where men are more external figures. There’s a lot to speculate there, but I will stick with AH.]
On the other hand, se’if forty-six adds an important exception, if she has a wound, the bleeding is not from any bodily processes, is no different from if she had pricked her finger, neither zivah nor niddah occurs. However, we have an established assumption, an chazakah that blood found in certain places is treated as flow from the womb.
It determines our attitude sufficiently to even allow/require us to burn sanctified materials she touches. Were we in doubt about her status, we would not do that. Such rules showed Tosafot (and us) the various kinds of blood are visually indistinguishable in halachah, are expected to look exactly the same, so we need rules to decide which kind of blood it is.
Not Feeling It
Se’if 47 brings us back to a challenge of niddah in today’s world: without the woman having felt the movement of blood, she is not teme’ah at a Biblical level. For hundreds of years, though, women have reported not having the sensation the Gemara describes.
Before we get to that, the whole idea of ketamim, assigning a niddah status based on a stain on her clothing, seems to go against the need for hargashah, feeling the flow. Se’if forty-eight says Chazal worried she might have not noticed when she had the required feeling, or mistaken it for something else (the need to urinate, for example), and the same applies to when a woman is required to check herself with a cloth and finds blood on the cloth; we worry there was a hargashah, either unnoticed or forgotten.
Feeling It
What would it mean to feel the blood move? SA in simanim 188 and 190 says she feels her uterus open, which AH likens to urination, because the Gemara thought she might confuse the two. He cites a few verses where the root ragash, to feel, is used more in the sense of to know, and thinks here, too, the Gemara and halachah meant the woman knows as it happens.
Rambam went further, thought the woman’s whole body shook when she started to menstruate, except AH in se’if 59 moderates that, thinks Rambam largely agreed with Rashi and Tosafot, as we said above, it’s the feeling of opening of a sphincter, similar to urination.
Noda Bi-Yehudah had suggested it would be enough to have a feeling of zivat davar lach, the seepage of a liquid, a standard AH is not prepared to fully accept.
Our main issues for this time: the role of ketamim, stains, a reminder of our flattened practice, wiping away the difference between zivah and niddah, between men’s and women’s zivah, and what we mean by “feeling” to make a woman a Biblical niddah.
Next time, we’ll do some Even HaEzer, the celebration of the week of sheva berachot after a wedding.
