Hello, dear Torah lovers! Here is your periodic (sorry) update on what I am thinking about as I write my queer niddah book. The following is an excerpt from the section I am currently working on about understanding niddah through a purity lens, as part of an exploration of different ways to understand niddah (purity, sexual prohibition, a secret third thing which is covenant). It draws heavily on the scholarship of Mira Balberg in her book “Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature,” but I think even though I am giving you only an excerpt and not the full piece of writing, which has more detailed engagement with Balberg, it will still make sense. Also, a reminder that this is literally a first draft — some, all, or none of this might make it into the final book (iyh one day)!
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As characterized by Balberg, a focused boundaried-ness is the ideal state that the rabbis ascribe to those who pay attention to their own purity. But menstruation, and even having a body that has the potential to menstruate, makes such a focus impossible. For a person who menstruates, then, within a purity-centered understanding of niddah, to have a niddah practice is to attend to our own porousness.
In the rabbinic understanding that Balberg lays out, having an “overflowing” body is in tension with experiencing “the self as a committed and active legal subject.” An ideal, non-menstruating masculine subject of rabbinic law pays attention constantly to the boundaries of their body to avoid any fluidity and to maintain firm borders of the self. But niddah practice makes this something of a paradox.
As by far the largest group of Jewish people who today maintain a practice related to bodily purity, menstruators are now the people for whom the focused attention on the body and self that characterizes rabbinic purity is most operational. But this attention, rather than as an attempt to stymie a fundamental human porousness, is instead attention to the very crux of “undisciplined” leakiness: menstruation. Rather than the “pure” subject striving to attend to and avoid possibilities for permeability with the world surrounding them, they directs their attention to the permeability of their own menstruating body, whose boundaries with the world beyond the self are never fixed.
It is far from novel to suggest a framing of niddah that emphasizes a nuanced relationship with human porousness and vulnerability. Rachel Adler famously asserts (and then famously recanted her theory) that niddah, through a purity framework, is about the “the symbolism of death and resurrection.” She begins her piece “Tum’ah and Tohorah: Ends and Beginnings” as follows:
All things die and are reborn continually. The plant which bows its head to the earth leaves its life capsulized in the dormant seed. In our own bodies, death and regeneration proceed cell by cell. Our fingernails grow, die, and are discarded; our hair also. Our skins slough off dead cells, while a tender new layer forms beneath the surface. Within us our organs repair and renew themselves repeatedly. Throughout each teeming and dying body, moreover, flows an undying spirit. It is confined to no single area but, as the Sages taught, it “fills the body as the ocean fills its bed.” That spirit is the soul. Only a conscious being has a soul. Of what is such a being conscious? He is aware of himself. He is aware also of his own growth process and of his history. Our consciousness tells us that we are created being and so are mortal. Our soul tells us that we are the image of the Creator and so cannot be mortal. Our knowledge of ourselves, then, is paradoxical. How do we reconcile it and make ourselves whole? Jews solve the paradox with the ritual cycle of tum’ah and tohorah, in which we act out our death and resurrection.
A careful reader will notice the parallels between Adler’s characterization of the purpose of purity practices and Balberg’s description of the rabbis’ attitudes. Adler contrasts the “teeming” body with the “conscious being,” who is “aware of himself.” The vulnerability and porousness of the dying body is at odds with the transcendent, and in some ways unchanging, soul. Contra Balberg’s rabbis, though, Adler frames niddah as a paradigmatic example of the religious subject’s use of purity discourse as part of self-understanding and self-definition.
Adler characterizes menstruation as a moment of transition, “an autumn within.” She writes that “[b]egetting and birth are the nexus points at which life and death are coupled. They are the beginnings which point to an end. Menstruation, too, is a nexus point. It is an end which points to a beginning. At the nexus points, the begetter becomes tameh. The fluids on which new life depends – the semen, the rich uteral lining which sustains embryonic life – the departure of these from the body leaves the giver tameh. The menstrual blood, which inside the womb was a potent nutriment is a token of dying when it is shed.”
This vivid description of human “leakiness” is perhaps precisely the kind of experience which made the rabbis see menstruating people as less ideal subjects of theur purity regulations. Menstruation as a “nexus point” is threatening to an ideal of the bounded and defined human body, both physically and representationally. For Adler, though, unlike the rabbis, this attention to porousness and fluidity is positive.
…. [there is another large chunk of draft chapter here, but you don’t get the whole section!! Sorry!]
Rachel Adler’s work on niddah is canonical in the Jewish feminist bookshelf. But here, I turn to a less-famous essay that is not, for the most part, explicitly about menstruation. In her essay “A Question of Boundaries,” Adler explores how boundaries can be “loci of interaction. A cell membrane, for example, is part of the living substance of the cell. It is the perimeter at which the cell conducts its interchanges with other cells – the contacts, the flowings in and out, which main- tain its life within its environment. The boundary between self and other … resembles this living, permeable boundary.”
These permeable boundaries are exactly the focus of purity-based niddah practice. The person who observes niddah, understood through the framework of purity, gives their attention to their own porousness, the inherent and unavoidable interrelation of their self and their body with the people and things outside of it. But for Adler, this is an ideal, feminist approach:
The Torah of self and other that we first encountered as ivrim [ANH: crossers-over, like Avraham and Sarah] and later internalized through liberation, covenant, and prophetic admonition erodes and must eventually obliterate the fixed, impermeable boundaries that define the world of patriarchal dualism.
Adler sees a challenging of fixed boundaries – between the self and others, between the body and the world around it, as part of “the revelation of a God who is present in every place that makes possible the moral universe of the covenant, where relatedness rather than location becomes the ground of ethics.” It is the places where boundaries are permeable and flexible that are the locus of revelation; it is the attention to these places that creates a holy subject.
Adler does not shy away from the way sexgender shapes the troubling of boundaries. On the contrary: “zakhar [male] names as his antithesis negeva [female], the pierced one, the one whose boundaries are penetrated by the invading male…Negeva represents not only an objectification but a projection. In this naming, patriarchal man points at the other as the permeable one. He portrays himself as sealed and impenetrable.” But this impenetrability, rather than being that which is ideal and should be pursued, is at best a delusion and at worst a form of violence.
By defining woman oppositionally as derivative isha or invaded negeva, patriarchal texts refuse to acknowledge a shared reality. We could call this the reality of mutual interpenetration. Interpenetration, interconnectedness, and interdependency attest that not only do we inhabit a single context, but within that context we live deeply within one another's boundaries. The only way to in/habit, one must conclude, is to co/habit. The patriarchal fantasy of the impermeable self is a snare and a delusion. Human beings are profoundly interdependent. We begin life tiny and helpless, utterly dependent on others. We come to perceive ourselves as distinct and particular beings only through experiencing our impact upon others and their impact upon us. Intimacy is a survival need for our species. Babies who lack a caring other to bond with, even if they are fed and cleaned, die in alarming numbers from a syndrome known simply as "failure to thrive." From birth to death we coexist in a great network of others, bound to them by speech, by touch, by labors, quests, exchanges, and stories.
Adler here gives voice to the feminist centrality of bodily and emotional porousness. A queer feminist ethic of boundaries is not one that lacks or rejects boundaries entirely – such an approach has been criticized for its anti-Jewish sentiment, among other problems – but it is one that does not lionize an “impermeable self.” Rather, we ought to embrace the version of the self that is an obstacle to ideal rabbinic purity in Balberg’s formulation. The nature of menstruating bodies as “constantly traversing boundaries” is an opportunity rather than an obstacle.
The queer potential of this feminist approach to niddah through a purity framework leaps from Adler’s words. The “reality of mutual interpenetration” is for Adler a metaphor – it is language for the ways in which “we coexist in a great network of others.” But read with a queer lens, this reality of mutual interpenetration is a REALITY. Queer sex sometimes involves no penetration, sometimes involves unidirectional penetration, and sometimes involves literal mutual interpenetration.
A comment from my read-through that might be a useful reflection for you:
A menstruating body is irreconcilable with the ideally pure body, bounded and defined as a whole self in its separateness. Menstruation is a threat because of its uncontrollability, presumably. It is not unique in this feature, though—cf wet dreams. It does uniquely combine uncontrollability with regularity, however—perhaps that is the real threat, that the self can be more or less integrally constructed “around” incidental moments like wet dreams, but menstruation is too central to embodied experience to be bracketed. Adler goes on to argue that *all* experience is essentially like menstruation, in this sense.