Three Times to Learn a Rhythm

About This Talk

Chapter 8 is the chapter of the veset, the established time when a woman can anticipate the onset of her cycle, and it pairs careful anticipation with firm limits on it. The Rambam defines a true veset as a fixed day of the month joined to bodily signs such as yawning, sneezing, heaviness at the opening of the stomach or warmth, and rules that a woman without a fixed veset examines herself first, while one with a veset is restricted for the whole day or the whole night of it and reckons her days of niddah and zivah from it. A pattern is established only by three occurrences and uprooted only by being bypassed three times, so a woman whose twentieth gives way to the twenty-third guards both days until the third month, when the twentieth is released; a cycle brought on by an outside cause such as strenuous jumping never becomes a veset even if repeated, though an interval that repeats three times does; an advancing pattern of the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth is a veset that moves, and a broken step undoes it; and each deviation leaves both the old and the new day guarded until three months decide. No veset is set within days of niddah on which she has seen, nor in her days of zivah, and one that appears in days of zivah is uprooted by a single bypass. Frequent inspection is praised, yet she is presumed pure in her days of zivah and presumed pure when she has not inspected at all; if she did not inspect at her veset and later found blood, she is impure retroactively from the veset with regard to pure objects but not with regard to her husband, and counts from the discovery, while if she found herself pure she is pure; blood from a known wound is pure even on the day of the veset, since concern for vesetot is Rabbinic. A blind woman examines herself and shows the cloth to friends, and capable women examine a woman who cannot understand. The chapter ends with the woman who has lost her count: she takes the stringencies of niddah and zavah together, is a doubtful zavah after three to eleven days of bleeding and a certain zavah from twelve, counts seven clean days once bleeding stops even after a thousand days, and never counts fewer than seven or more than seventeen before her days of niddah begin anew.