Daf Yomi: Niddah pp. 7-9. We start with a new Mishna where R. Eliezer says, "For four women the time [of first seeing blood] suffices [to prevent retroactive impurity] - a virgin, a pregnant woman, a nursing mother, and an old lady." Now you might think that you know what these terms mean, but if you've studied Talmud you know that any sentence that starts with 'you might think that …' is going to conclude by proving that what comes next wrong. Indeed, the first thing the Gemara does is try to define exactly who these women are. It seems that R. Eliezer is talking about women who don't normally menstruate, but how does that apply to a virgin?
To my surprise, a virgin in this context has nothing to do with whether she's had sexual relations. Here, a virgin is a girl who has never menstruated before. She could be a bride who bled on her wedding night or even a mother who bled from childbirth [neither situation makes a woman tamei], yet she is still considered a virgin as far as niddah in calculated. Several rabbis complain that this is not the proper definition of virgin, but eventually they agree that this is what R. Eliezer means by it.
The pregnant woman is defined as one whose fetus can be discerned, which R. Meir declares is at 3 months. He cites a Torah verse [Gen 38:24] as proof, since when "a third of her months had passed," Judah was informed that his daughter-in-law Tamar had conceived through harlotry. Again, you might think the pregnant woman herself should be consulted, but no.
Defining the nursing woman is even more interesting from a modern perspective, because some of the rabbis want to consider a new mother 'nursing' for 24 months after a birth, no matter when she weans the child or even if the baby dies earlier. R. Meir says that her menstrual blood is transformed into milk, so as long as she is physically nursing the child, she qualifies. R. Yehuda and others say that the trauma of labor causes her menses to cease, and this is in effect for 24 months after she gives birth, even if she hires a wet nurse.
Lastly, what is an old woman? R. Yehuda sums it up nicely with two criteria: she is one for whom three months have passed without her discharging blood and whose friends say that she is old. At age 62, I have qualifed for the first of these for many years, but I'm not so sure my friends would call me old yet.
Here's the book trailer for RAV HISDA'S DAUGHTER, due out in July 2012. Isn't it fabulous?
Daf Yomi: Niddah pp. 4-6. These pages go on and on about retroactive impurity and doubtful impurity and how this applies to women handling wine, bread, and plain old ordinary food. The rabbis try hard to find a coherent policy, but nobody ever mentions the elephant in the room - tumah met, the impurity of death. This is the most severe kind of ritual impurity, and immersing in a mikvah doesn’t affect it. People who have become tamei met by touching a dead body, or even being in the same room with one, make anything and anyone they touch tamei met as well, and these continue to transmit impurity to anyone/anything they touch. Tumah met can only be purified by the ashes of the red heifer, which can only be prepared by priests in the Holy Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE.
While there is a Mishna Parah on the red heifer, there is no Gemara either in the Jerusalem or Babylonian Talmud, so it appears that by the time of the rabbis, this ritual was in abeyance. Perhaps a few priestly families in Israel still had some of remaining red heifer ashes for a while after the Temple’s destruction, but it is unlikely that anyone in Babylonia did. In other words, considering all the people who died in the Roman wars, not to mention the high level of child mortality, surely it didn’t take long for the entire Jewish population to become tamei met.
So our discussion in Niddah so far amounts to a good deal of wishful thinking. In reality, every woman old enough to be involved in food preparation had likely already become irreversibly tamei met, in which case her niddah impurity status was irrelevant for everyone except her husband.
Daf Yomi – Niddah p.3. After only 3 days, I realize I must make a compromise in my blogging schedule. With RAV HISDA'S DAUGHTER coming out on the exact day daf yomi ends, I cannot restrict myself to posts concerned only with Tractate Niddah in the interim. So I’ve decided to write about my novel journey once a week, and my daf yomi journey on two other days. I have no intention of merely summarizing my studies; rather I will point out some of the more interesting things I discover there. To my delight, I have an opportunity to cover both subjects today since Niddah 3ab contains a debate involving Rava and Abaye in addition to Hillel and Shammai.
Let me start by introducing two of the main male characters in BOOK 2 - ENCHANTRESS [which I have already begun writing]: Rava, my heroine's second husband, and Abaye, his friend and study partner. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Talmud knows that these two are the quintessential opponents in Babylonia, just as Hillel and Shammai were in Israel. As it says in the website above: If one asked a Talmudic scholar what constitutes classic “Gemara,” he would likely reply, “the dialogues of Abaye and Rava.” Their back-and-forth question and answer, point and counter-point, progressive refinement of the subject matter, which almost always involved the meaning of a Torah Law, but on occasion branched into other areas, is the Talmudic path to Truth.
Page 3 continues the discussion of retroactive impurity from the time the woman first sees menstrual blood. Abaye suggests she might not see blood immediately if she were wearing a mokh, a sponge cloth that woman inserted either to catch her menstrual flow or during intercourse as a contraceptive. Surprisingly, Rava agrees, but still defends Shammai's leniency against retroactive impurity. The reason? Because such a ruling would prevent procreation. If a couple feared that the woman might be tamei even before she saw blood, then they would be reluctant to engage in sexual relations. Therefore, so her husband might not think she's tamei, Rava says we are lenient even about food preparation before she saw blood.
What interesting lessons did I learn here that might be useful in my writing? First, that women in Babylonia commonly used a mokh, apparently for the same purposes modern women do. Second, that Rava wanted to encourage married couples to have sex, so much so that he overruled Hillel in favor of Shammai.
Chapter One of Tractate Niddah begins on page 2. As always in the Talmud, a chapter opens with the Mishna, which was redacted in about 200 CE in the land that the rabbis called Eretz Israel and the Roman’s called Palestina. I know I can’t summarize an entire two pages of Talmud in a short blog post, but I’ll try to give the highlights, or at least the parts I found interesting.
Our Mishna details a disagreement between Shammai and Hillel over when a woman who sees menstrual blood is considered tamei/impure. Although the Holy Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed over 100 years earlier, the Mishna is written as if it still stood. So menstrual impurity impacts how a woman may handle or prepare food, such as for priests, that must remain tahor/pure. Shammai [lenient] says that her impurity does not go back retroactively to render tamei any food she touched previously, while Hillel [strict] disagrees and says she is retroactively tamei from the last time she checked and saw no blood. Neither of these opinions affects when a wife becomes forbidden to her husband; both agree that happens when she actually sees blood.
Interestingly, this short piece confirms what I’d previously learned from JTS Talmud professor Judith Hauptman. She taught that while Hillel’s interpretations of Jewish Law are generally considered more lenient than Shammai’s, when it comes to women’s issues, particularly those involving her relationship with her husband [divorce, betrothal, marital property], Shammai is the more lenient of the two sages.
Certainly making a woman in a priestly family retroactively tamei will create all sorts of problems for her family, who ate the food she prepared days earlier when she and they thought she was tahor. The Talmudic rabbis who discuss this Mishna centuries later know full well that without a Temple their debate is moot, but they study it anyway. And so do we.
Daf Yomi (Hebrew for "page daily") is a regimen where each day a person studies one daf, (both sides of the page) of the Babylonian Talmud. Under this schedule, the entire 2711 pages of Talmud can be completed, one day at a time, in seven and a half years. The idea of Jews everywhere studying the entire Talmud together was proposed in 1923 by Rabbi Meir Shapiro. The first cycle began on the first day of Rosh Hashanah 5684 (11 September 1923). The current cycle started on March 2, 2005 with page 2 [page one is a title page] of Tractate Berachot [blessings] and will finish this year on August 1 with page 73 of Tractate Niddah [menstruation]. In a stunning coincidence, the publication date for RAV HISDA'S DAUGHTER has just been moved to July 31 to accommodate certain booksellers who wish to promote its sale for High Holy Days.
Back in 1923, nobody imagined that women might undertake this kind, or probably any kind, of Talmud study. Of course nobody imagined that anyone would be able to do so via the Internet either. But because of the latter, the former is now possible. Indeed there are many websites devoted to Daf Yomi, including the previous link and this one that deliver daily lessons to students via email.
I've been studying Talmud for 20 years, but never considered Daf Yomi because it is by nature a superficial learning method. To truly understand a typical Talmudic argument, one might need to spend a week or more, and in my first class with Rachel Adler, it took us 5 years to learn Tracate Berachot from start to finish. But I couldn't resist taking a taste of Daf Yomi, especially since the final tractate, Niddah, can't help but concern women. Page 2 of Niddah starts this Wednesday, and I'm going for it. Note only will I attempt to study a page a day, but I intend to blog about what I find there as well.
Today I woke up energized and ready to get some writing done on Volume 2 of RAV HISDA'S DAUGHTER. But when I tried to check my email first, a Firefox update automatically loaded itself and my screen froze. Turning my computer off and on again only repeated the scenario. I won't go into how many hours I spent trying to fix the problem, only to eventually abandon Firefox and install Google chrome instead, which necessitated reentering all my bookmarks and passwords. So as a toast to those who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, I offer the following:
At a recent computer expo, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry, saying, "If Ford had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." In response, Ford issued a press release stating: If Ford had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash...Twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would
cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was
reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single 'This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation' warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask 'Are you sure?' before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to
learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. When all else failed, you could call 'customer service' in some foreign country and be instructed in some foreign language how to fix your car yourself!
Today I woke up energized and ready to get some writing done on Volume 2 of RAV HISDA'S DAUGHTER. But when I tried to check my email first, a Firefox update automatically loaded itself and my screen froze. Turning my computer off and on again only repeated the scenario. I won't go into how many hours I spent trying to fix the problem, only to eventually abandon Firefox and install Google chrome instead, which necessitated reentering all my bookmarks and passwords. So as a toast to those who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, I offer the following:
At a recent computer expo, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry, saying, "If Ford had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." In response, Ford issued a press release stating: If Ford had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash...Twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would
cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was
reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single 'This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation' warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask 'Are you sure?' before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to
learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. When all else failed, you could call 'customer service' in some foreign country and be instructed in some foreign language how to fix your car yourself!
As many of you may know, HUC professor and feminist theologian Rachel Adler was my first Talmud teacher, the one who got me hooked on Talmud and Rashi way back in 1992. And in one of those strange quirks of fate, when she decided to become ordained as a rabbi last year, she chose my synagogue, Beth Chayim Chadashim, to do her rabbinic internship. Most people would find it odd that someone with her credentials has to intern at a synagogue, but that's the rule. You can imagine my shock and delight when I learned that Rachel chose my shul for this honor. So this year I've studied with her, davened with her, and observed all the Jewish holidays with her. For more info about Rachel's journey to the rabbinate, read this article from the LA Jewish Journal.
Friday night, in honor of her ordination on Sunday, she gave one of the most impressive and powerful sermons I've ever heard. All this week you can hear her words yourself by clicking on the following link. After this Friday, you can still listen via Livestream's stored videos.
Safely home from a well-deserved family cruise vacation, I continue with the second half of previous post: Meanwhile, I learned that the Talmud contained discussions of spells, amulets, demons, the Evil Eye, and other occult subjects. Magic was clearly an integral part of life in this world, and some of the rabbis, including Rav Hisda, performed what we would call acts of magic themselves. But rabbinic sages agreed that sorcery was mostly the province of women. Though the Bible says, “You shall not allow a sorceress to live,” these women were able to practice freely. They were respected professionals, not scary hags with pointy hats as in Snow White and Wizard of Oz. The Talmud even tells of a rabbi who consulted the ‘head sorceress’ to learn a special protective spell.
It came to me when I read that Rav Hisda’s daughter demonstrated various ways of protecting her husband, a rabbi well versed in magic himself, from demons. My heroine was an enchantress! Not only that, but sorceresses who inscribed incantation bowls were probably members of rabbinic families too, for what other Jewish women would be literate and learned enough to create them? My literary task was to show her becoming an enchantress in a society where, unlike today, highly educated people accepted magic as real and effective.
The difference between Rav Hisda’s Daughter and supernatural novels like Harry Potter, Witches of Eastwick, and the Twilight series, is that the magic in those stories is clearly fictional, the product of the novelist’s imagination. I use actual, historical, spells and procedures from incantation bowls, amulets, magical instruction manuals, and the Talmud. But surely that ancient magic didn’t really work any better than Harry Patter’s.
Yet perhaps it did work more often than one might think. Since many people recovered from their injuries and illnesses, most pregnant women did not die in childbirth, and the majority of children survived childhood, spells to heal and protect them were clearly successful. Physicians now know that the placebo effect is real. And then there are occasional magical procedures from the Talmud such washing one’s hands upon leaving a privy or sickroom, as protection against the myriad demons who lurk there. Change ‘demons’ to ‘viruses and bacteria,’ and we have one of today’s most effective public health measures.