Commenting on this passage, Ms. Alifa Saadya writes:
You wrote: “Thus, as is clear from the cited
part of the Torah, copulation with a menstruous woman was a punishable crime
according to the Torah” and in the same paragraph, “.actually
required a woman to be completely secluded from the rest of the
household.”Regarding the punishment of “karet” -
being “cut off” - this was not a punishment administered by any
rabbinic court, but only by God. Usually it was interpreted to mean an early,
unexpected death. The punishment of “karet” is between the sinner
and God, and should not be speculated upon by others.It is my understanding that at no time in Jewish
history were women secluded from the rest of the household during their
menstrual period. At any rate, that was the response I had when I posed the
question to a rabbi several years ago.Things that made you “impure” were, first
of all, never associated with sin. Rather, impurity was a temporary condition,
and always had some means of being rid of it. In practical terms, a person who
had contacted some form of ritual impurity was not allowed to enter the holy
precincts of the Tabernacle or Temple, nor to partake of certain of the
sacrifices that were shared out among relatives and friends, and the priests.
Removing the simpler types of ritual impurity usually meant waiting a certain
period (“until nightfall” or whatever) and then bathing. It is
important to remember that in the time of the Temple, men had as many or more
opportunities to become ritually impure than women did, so there is absolutely
no onus on women for having menses, heaven forfend! Things that made one
ritually impure were usually things you had no control over. The concept is
closer to the idea of “taboo” than anything else. In my opinion, the
idea has a lot to do with the “sense of the holy” that human beings
developed, with its concommitent sense that being in a holy place required one
to be physically clean, dressed in a tzniut (modest) manner, and of humble
heart, free from any clinging to sin. The spiritual danger was that people
would be, as the Christian term is “whited sepulchres” - i.e.,
clean in body and dress, but full of evil thoughts hidden from view.Regarding a husband and wife, the husband was not
supposed to sit on his wife's bed, or touch her, or share utensils, but in all
other respects they could interact as usual. In fact, this is a major point
being made in the books that are published for new brides - to emphasize that
a relationship has many aspects outside of sex, and to encourage the growth of
love and respect in _all_ areas of married life, along with the virtues of
patience and self-control.There is also a large area of halakha (Jewish law)
related to the purity of “vessels” (i.e., cooking pots, etc.), and I
have never studied this aspect of halakha because only some minor aspects of
it apply to Jewish practice nowadays. In the time of the Temple, however,
people were very careful about these matters, and in archaeological digs of
the homes of the wealthy, one finds that there was a preference for using
bowls and containers made of stone, because stone did not become ritually
impure, as did metal and ceramic items. Even today, though, anyone who buys
new utensils of
metal, ceramic, or glass, takes them to a mikveh to immerse before using them.The subject of purity of vessels raises the question, then, of what did Jewish
women do who had to cook and prepare meals with various utensils when they
were having their periods. And I do not know the answer, since this is no
longer a practical issue, but just something that is studied in the yeshivot
(schools of higher Jewish learning).
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