No Court Left to Ask

About This Talk

Chapter 11 is the Rambam's account of how niddah and zivah are practiced once the Supreme Sanhedrin no longer sits: Scriptural law assumed a court with sages familiar with the bloods to whom doubts could ascend, the count runs from the first discovery of bleeding in a life so that a girl cannot be a zavah before she is ten days old, and when the reckoning outran what all women could calculate the Sages decreed that every day be treated as a day of zivah and every discovery as zivah bleeding. On top of that, Jewish women accepted a stringency no verse requires, counting seven spotless days for any discovery of impure bleeding down to a drop the size of a mustard seed and immersing on the night of the eighth, which the Rambam extends to every birth in the present age; the Geonim abolished the former days of purity, France retained the older practice as a matter of local custom, a bride counts seven spotless days from her consent and may marry a Torah scholar before completing them, and of all this he writes that one should never deviate from it. He then fences the severity from both sides: stains keep their earlier rules and an impure stain starts a count from the day of its discovery, a miscarriage of a pure form, a white or green secretion, a red mass without bleeding, a wound and blood released with urine all remain pure, while the custom of seven niddah days before the seven spotless days is an error and the custom of forty days after a son or eighty after a daughter is of a heretical nature learned from the Sadducees, which it is a mitzvah to uproot. The chapter closes on the one act that changes status, immersion in an acceptable mikveh with nothing intervening between flesh and water since a bath accomplishes nothing, on an immersion taken inside the seven days being void, and on the laws of distance during the count, ending with permission for a woman to adorn herself so that she does not become unattractive to her husband.