Rosh Chodesh Nisan: Nooks and Crannies
The local mikveh where I grew up would send out bedikat chametz kits every year as a fundraiser. Sometimes, we day school students would be drafted into assembling them: feather, spoon, candle, all into an envelope. This was so natural to me that it never occurred to me that it was incongruous for the mikvah’s fundraiser to be Pesach-specific. While I’m confident that this really was just a cute fundraiser idea that endured for years, there is actually a deep connection between niddah practice and the search for chametz. After all, they both involve careful bedikot.
I’ve had the joy of learning in a halacha shiur focused on Pesach these past few months,* and we spent substantial time on Bedikat Chametz. Over and over, I have been struck by the parallels between the careful vaginal inspections required in standard niddah practice and the attention required in searching the home for leaven.
The Shulchan Aruch (YD 196:6), describes the requirement for niddah bedikot as follows, attempting to harmonize a messy medieval cacophony:
כל בדיקות אלו… ותכניסנו באותו מקום בעומק לחורים ולסדקים עד מקום שהשמש דש ותראה אם יש בו שום מראה אדמומית…
All of these internal examinations (bedikot)...and she should bring it inside her vagina with some depth, to the holes and crevices, until the place where the penis reaches [during sex]...
Compare this to the Shulchan Aruch’s discussion of the pre-Pesach search for chametz (OH 431:1):
בתחלת ליל י"ד בניסן בודקין את החמץ לאור הנר בחורין ובסדקין בכל המקומות שדרך להכניס שם חמץ:
At the beginning of the night of the 14th of Nisan, we search for chametz by the light of a candle in holes and crevices in every place that it would be usual to have brought chametz.
The exact same language, חורין וסדקין, holes and crevices (or, more literarily, nooks and crannies) is used to describe a bedikah for niddah and for chametz!
The connection is perhaps even more pronounced in the Gemara (Pesachim 8a):
תָּנָא: אֵין מְחַיְּיבִין אוֹתוֹ לְהַכְנִיס יָדוֹ לְחוֹרִין וְלִסְדָקִין לִבְדּוֹק — מִפְּנֵי הַסַּכָּנָה. מַאי סַכָּנָה? אִי נֵימָא מִפְּנֵי סַכָּנַת עַקְרָב — כִּי מִשְׁתַּמַּשׁ, הֵיכִי אִישְׁתַּמַּשׁ? לָא צְרִיכָא, דִּנְפַל.
It was taught in the Tosefta: The Sages do not require one to place his hand into holes and crevices to search for leaven, due to the danger involved. The Gemara asks: Due to what danger? If we say it is due to the danger of a scorpion that might be in this hole, when he made use of the hole in the first place, how did he make use of it if there were scorpions there? If the hole is never used, there is no need to search it in any case. The Gemara answers: No, it is necessary to search this hole in a case where leaven fell into it unintentionally.
Here, a person must put their hand into the hole and feel around to make sure there is no problematic material inside!!
This sugya evokes what Charlotte Fonrobert terms “the rabbinic architecture of the woman’s body.” In her discussion of a sugya about niddah that explicitly compare the vagina and uterus to different parts of a house, Fonrobert writes:
… a symmetrical relationship between male and female bodies, the physiology of male and female discharges, and the impurity ascribed to them, has vanished into the spaces of the woman who is the house. The woman’s body has been rendered as diametrically opposed to the male body, as the embodiment of interiority versus the male embodiment of exteriority.**
Both types of bedikot are an attempt to know – and therefore better manage or control – what is going on inside a house or body. A person can’t know if any spare crumbs have made their way into the corners of a house. And the rabbis imagine that without a bedikah, a person can’t know if they’re done menstruating.
In both niddah and bedikat chametz, the Rabbis have to prove that women can be reliable narrators. There is robust halachic examination of in what cases (conclusion: most cases) a woman is to be believed when she tells her husband she has finished her period and immersed; similarly, there is a substantial conversation about if women can be relied on to do bedikat chametz (conclusion: I got frustrated reviewing these sources but we’re going to go with yes).
The Nodah B’Yehudah, a modern Ashkenazi posek, draws on a creative reading done by the Raavad to suggest that actually, bedikot are all about internal awareness by the menstruating person themselves:
הרי עיקר הבדיקה מה שהיא נותנת דעתה אם היא טהורה ואם איתא דהוי דם בבית החיצון היתה מרגשת בעצמה.
The essence of the bedikah is therefore that she pays attention to if she’s tehora, and if there’s blood in the vagina she’d feel it in herself.
(Responsa Noda B’Yehuda 141:46)
This take on bedikot for niddah re-empowers the menstruating person. In Fonrobert’s words (about a different text, but they apply well here), this perspective
reconfigures the female body as animated, as a sentient entity. All of a sudden, the “house” is no longer empty, but has a master of its own. It is already occupied, so to speak, by her “sensation,” thus rendering it uninhabitable for the androcentric perspective. In fact, this reading renders the woman’s body at least partially inaccessible to its androcentric objectification in halakhic discourse.
I don’t have a tidy bow to conclude with here – after all, bedikat chametz is done in a real house, not a metaphorical house that is actually a person’s body. But one direction I am leaning is to return to trust rather than suspicion.
Pesach makes it easy to scrutinize ourselves and others. Beyond the “what is your spiritual chametz” business, I find it hard to trust myself that I have cleaned enough or am prepared enough (this is my first year making Pesach fully in my own home). I’m triple-checking labels in the kosher supermarket to make sure I haven’t accidentally picked up a non-Pesach product, and making lists and lists and lists.
For Nisan, I want to lean more into trust. I am not an “empty house,” one where I should lack confidence and scrutinize every corner. I am a person, and I can trust myself and my own stories.
Chodesh tov!
*Thank you, Rabbi Dr. Josh Kulp!!
**Charlotte E. Fonrobert, 2000., Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 56
Thank you for this!