Easy as 1,2,3

Following one’s period, someone with an irregular flow—and in today’s halachah, every menstruant—must ‘count for herself’ (Vayikra 15:28) seven days. Every morning and evening, one needs to perform internal checks to make sure there is no blood.* What hints of holiness can we find in this ritual of counting?

Although there’s no mention of checks in the Biblical passages about a niddah or zavah, they are described extensively in the Mishna, the earliest layer of rabbinic literature:

 …וּפַעֲמַיִם צְרִיכָה לִהְיוֹת בּוֹדֶקֶת, בְּשַׁחֲרִית וּבֵין הַשְּׁמָשׁוֹת…

…she needs to check twice [each day] in the morning [shacharit] and at twilight…

Mishna Niddah 1:7

The Mishna isn’t precisely referring to checks during the seven clean days. Rather, it imagines a world in which women perform these checks every day, regardless of the time of the month. But Yosef Caro, the compiler of the Shulchan Aruch, explicitly cites this mishna as the reason why during the seven clean days, one should check twice a day.

In her book Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism, Dr Sarit Kattan Gribetz describes how the rituals of Rabbinic Judaism create differentiated men and women’s time. She describes how reciting the verses of the Shema, which in the Torah seem unconnected to gender, becomes a men’s practice from which women are excluded. Meanwhile, the laws of purity, which as we saw earlier in their Biblical form affect men and women alike, cease to be relevant for men. While men recite the Shema morning and evening, women check for bleeding at these same times. These rituals shape different daily experiences:

“Women who observed rabbinic law turned inward, into their bodies, to mark time. Their bodies’ rhythms and the structures imposed on them determined their times of purity and impurity and, by extension, the way they conducted themselves at different times of the month and the day. This inward orientation is very different from the bodily orientation of the recitation of the Shema and, in turn, the larger category of time-bound commandments, in which men turn toward the celestial bodies and other external signs to mark the appropriate times for rituals and prayers. Rituals that marked men’s time oriented the subject toward God, for the purpose of establishing a relationship with the divine (the Shema prayer required turning one’s heart to God), while rituals that marked women’s time functioned to turn the subject’s attention inward, toward the body, for the purpose of establishing the purity status of objects and people that have come in physical contact with that woman.”

In the period of the early rabbis, men mark time with rituals that centre God, while women focus on their internal bodies. Is it possible for the experience of counting seven clean days to be both internal and external, a time for connecting both to one’s body and also to the Divine?

By the later halachic sources, these two experiences of time begin to interact. In the Beit Yosef, Yosef Caro’s more comprehensive work, he says:

בשם הרוקח שבודקת פעמיים בכל יום מימי הספירה פעם אחת בשחרית כשעומדת ממטתה ופעם אחת כשהולכת לערבית ונראה לי שלמדו כן מדתנן בפ"ק דנדה (יא.) פעמים צריכה להיות בודקת שחרית ובין השמשות

According to the Rokeach, she checks twice per day during the days of her count: once in the morning [shacharit] when she gets out of bed, and once when she walks to evening prayers. And it seems to me that we learn this from the mishna in the first chapter of Niddah: ‘one checks twice per day, in the morning [shacharit] and at twilight’.

Beit Yosef, Yoreh Deah 196

Our timings have become enmeshed.  It’s worth noting that while the Rokeach, writing in 13th century Germany, does indeed mandate twice-daily checks, the language of ‘when she walks to evening prayers’ is entirely new to the Beit Yosef. For the first time, we’re picturing a world where women engage in both the external, holy time of prayer in the synagogue, and in the internal time of checking their bodies for blood. There’s little exposition on this phrase, and so we’re left to imagine for ourselves what it means: is this a woman who is literally walking to synagogue with a cloth inside her? Does he mean that one checks immediately before leaving the house? How does it feel to go straight from an intense experience of one’s internal body to praying to an infinite, bodiless God, while the sky darkens outside?

We’ve reached a world in which one can experience both the internal rituals of checking and also the communal, traditionally male world of synagogue prayers. But is it possible to go further, and find holiness in the internal checks themselves?

Tosafot provide an answer. Commenting on a passage of Gemara that emphasises that the menstruant herself must be responsible for counting, they ask:

וספרה לה לעצמה - וא"ת אמאי אין מברכת זבה על ספירתה כמו שמברכין על ספירת העומר דהא כתיב וספרה וי"ל דאין מברכין אלא ביובל שמברכין ב"ד בכל שנה שלעולם יוכל למנות כסדר וכן עומר אבל זבה שאם תראה תסתור אין לה למנות.

“And she counts for herself”: Why does a zavah not bless on her counting, like how one blesses on counting the Omer? Does the verse not say “and she counts”? The answer is that one only blesses on the Jubilee, which the Beit Din blesses every year, as one can always count it properly —and so with the Omer. But a zavah, where if she sees [blood] she restarts, she cannot count.

Tosafot on Ketubot 72a

Tosafot point out that elsewhere in Judaism, we do have holy rituals of counting: when we count the Omer (the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot), or when the rabbinic court blessed the 49 year cycle towards the Jubilee year. For the Omer, one says a blessing before fulfilling the commandment of counting. But it seems that something about a menstruant’s seven day count doesn’t meet this standard. Perhaps it’s the messiness of our bodies, which never quite have the predictability of a calendar count. Or perhaps it’s the individual nature of the ritual, which goes unseen by any Beit Din and by the community at large.  

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Hebrew word ‘hamakom’, which literally means ‘the place’, functions both as a euphemism for God and for the vagina. The external and the internal show us different forms of the holiness present in the world. Holiness, yes, is found in prayer. But it’s also present in our messy, changing bodies, themselves made in God’s image. Morning and evening, we recite the Shema. When we lie down and when we rise, we turn from one makom to another, and reach from our most intimate place to the greatest Unknown.

*Although twice a day is the halachic norm, there is a lot of flexibility for doing fewer checks in a difficult situation.