A Year of Biblical Womanhood

by Rachel Held Evans

  For millions of modern Jewish women, the principles outlined in this passage are not antiquated curiosities of an ancient time, but rules for living that still apply today. Leviticus 15 explains why the characters in Fiddler on the Roof grasp handkerchiefs between them while they dance. In Jewish communities where the taharat hamishpacha, or “laws of family purity,” are still observed, a husband and wife must avoid the slightest touch during a woman’s period.

  “From the first sign of blood, you start counting the days,” Ahava explained to me in an e-mail. “Until the end of the time, all physical contact between husband and wife is forbidden, as well as passing objects (he gets his own saltshaker!) and any kind of ‘sexual’ talk. We sleep in separate beds and aren’t supposed to look at each other undressed.”

  By this point in my relationship with Ahava, chatting about sex and saltshakers seemed perfectly natural. I was constantly e-mailing her with questions, especially as I prepared for the month of April, which for me would include eating kosher, celebrating Passover, and observing the laws of family purity. As our exchanges got more personal and substantive, I grew increasingly thankful for her friendship and advice, and I realized how anemic my Christian faith had been without context, without a connection to the people from whom my Bible came.

  “Then, five days to bleed,” Ahava continued, “hopefully not more. I start checking for traces of blood twice daily. As soon as I get a clean check, I count seven days, and on the final day I begin to prepare for going to the mikveh (ritual bath). That is a process designed to remove foreign substance from your body—from dirt under your nails, to loose hairs, to things stuck between your teeth. It can take anywhere from forty-five minutes to two hours. Once I’m ready to go, I call the mikveh attendant, and she also checks me over. Then I step down into the (thankfully) heated pool. It’s about five square feet in most places, with the water chest-high. You are supposed to push your breath out and dunk yourself under as best you can. When you come up, the attendant says, ‘Kosher!’ if all your hair went under, and you stand there in the water and say the blessing that translates, ‘Blessed are you L-rd our G-d,2 king of the universe who has sanctified us with the commandments and has commanded us concerning immersion.’ You can also take a moment for personal prayer.

  “In the past, when I was ready to get pregnant again, I prayed for my future kids; sometimes I pray for my husband or for our financial situation. After that, you can dunk again any number of times, depending on your custom, and then you get to go home and kiss your husband again! Usually my husband has been getting the kids to bed and showering himself, and possibly making dinner. So, yeah, coming home is pretty romantic.

  “I have mixed feelings about niddah these days,” Ahava confessed. “Sometimes it’s a nice break to not have any physical expectations in our relationship, but there have been extremely emotional times when a hug would have been nice, but it couldn’t happen. This is especially hard after giving birth, which is a hugely emotional time.” No hugging after the birth of a baby?

  This seemed unreasonable, even cruel. I wondered about women who miscarried and whose blood represented a deeply painful loss. Could the law not be broken to offer them comfort? What kind of God would be offended by that?

  Orthodox Jews like Ahava adhere to the laws of family purity simply because they are taught in the Torah. They need no other explanation or incentive to obey. However, many say that practicing taharat hamishpacha does have its advantages. For one thing, the timing of a couple’s reunion after niddah corresponds exactly with the time most women are ovulating, so couples hoping for children are in luck. In addition, word on the street is that Orthodox sex is super-steamy, that the forced separation ignites all the fantasies and longings of a couple about to embark on their honeymoon. Throw in a few readings from Song of Songs, and you’ve got the makings of some sweet post-mikveh lovemaking.

  In an article for YourTango.com titled “Why Orthodox Jews May Have the Hottest Sex Lives,” Lynne Meredith Schreiber wrote, “I chose this way of living because I liked the way Orthodox husbands looked at their wives—with smoldering sensuality, hidden knowing, and reverence. They spoke sweetly and didn’t play games, and I never saw the flicker of distance in their eyes.

  “As for those 12 days of separation,” she continued, “they’re hard, but the mandated time off is a gift . . . I look at him with the yearning I felt when we were dating. I start to fantasize. My husband’s hands look stronger to me, and I think of his touch. Here’s what we’ll do; here’s how he’ll touch me . . . In my world, every touch is electric.”3

  At the more popular level, modern impressions of biblical menstruation are largely informed by the success of Anita Diamant’s best-selling novel, The Red Tent, an imaginative retelling of the story of Jacob’s family through the eyes of Dinah, the daughter of Leah. In The Red Tent, menstruation is portrayed as a time of rest, repose, and female bonding as the women of the house of Jacob gather together each month to mark the new moon and the arrival of their cycles beneath a secluded red tent. While many cultures use huts or tents for the purpose of secluding menstruating women, there is no solid biblical or archaeological evidence to suggest this happened among tent-dwelling family groups in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, though it is certainly possible. Ahava called the entire book “nonsense,” but I read it anyway and loved it.

  Despite the promise of some hot post-niddah sex, I was nervous about my plans to observe taharat hamishpacha. I still had some questions about what I could and could not touch and about how to avoid rendering every chair or bench I sat on unclean. Also, upon looking at the calendar, I realized we were scheduled to attend a wedding during the latter half of my niddah. How would that work exactly? The whole thing felt a bit like getting caught in the tampon aisle at Walgreens. Before long, everyone in Dayton would know that the “manner of women” was upon me.

  “I just hope you don’t plan to camp out in a red tent,” Ahava said before signing off of chat one night.

  Unbeknownst to Ahava, I’d already begun gathering the disparate pieces of camping gear we had stowed about our house.

  But first, Passover . . .

  “Celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come.”

  —EXODUS 12:17

  Not unlike Christmas, the Jewish holidays are pulled off almost entirely by women, so making the traditional foods, preparing for company, and seeing that all the proper candles are lit and proper prayers recited seemed an integral part of “biblical womanhood” to me.

  There are five Jewish holidays mentioned specifically in the Torah: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Shavuot, Succot, and Pesach (Passover). Because the dates are different each year, only three of these overlapped with my project. The first to arrive on the calendar was Passover, which I decided to mark with a traditional Passover Seder—a ritualized feast celebrated on the first evening of the holiday in memory of the Israelites’ exodus out of Egypt.

  In addition to hosting a seder, I would spend the week observing the biblical dietary laws of kashrut (kosher), which are significantly stricter during the Passover holiday.

  My Passover Seder was scheduled for Tuesday, April 19. The Friday before, I was running a little close on time but feeling oh-so confident with my oh-so-kosher grocery list and the relative orderliness of my house that I e-mailed Ahava to brag about my progress.

  “That’s wonderful!” she replied. “Just let me know if you need help eliminating all the chametz from your house. That’s always a challenge.”

  Chametz refers to leavened bread, any food made of grain and water that has been allowed to ferment and rise. This includes bread, cereal, cookies, pizza, pasta, beer, and just about every processed food on the market. The Bible instructs Jewish people to eliminate chametz from their diets during Passover to commemorate the haste with which their ancestors fled Egypt (Exodus 13:3; 12:20;
Deuteronomy 16:3). As the story goes, the Israelites left in such a hurry, their bread didn’t have time to rise, so it was brought with them as flat, unleavened cakes called matzah. The penalty for intentionally eating a piece of chametz the size of an olive or bigger during Passover was to be “cut off from Israel” (Exodus 12:15).

  I knew about eliminating chametz from my diet, but this was the first I’d heard about eliminating it from my house. I asked Ahava for more details.

  “Oh we get rid of all the chametz” she said, “down to the last crumb. Some women literally spend weeks cleaning. I have devoted this entire week to cleaning, but I did some sorting prior. All I have left is to do is clean out the fridge and kasher the kitchen. Then, after Shabbat, I’ll kasher the dining room table and floor.”

  Kashering for Passover is the process of deep-cleaning dishes, pots, pans, flatware, glassware, countertops, appliances, and floors with scalding hot water, so as to completely purge them of any traces of chametz. Some Orthodox Jews even take select dishes to a mikveh for ritual immersion. After kashering, all these items must be covered in plastic wrap so they are not exposed to chametz between the kashering and the start of the holiday.

  “The run-up to Passover and the seder is killer,” Ahava continued. “I actually saw one panicked woman running through the grocery store on the day before the holiday last year. Passover tends to make us all a little crazy.”

  This didn’t sound like fun anymore. It sounded like Christmas, and I needed a way out of it fast.

  “The part about eliminating the chametz from your house is not in the Torah, right?” I wrote Ahava hopefully. “It’s rabbinic tradition, but not really part of the law.” (After all, this was my year of living biblically, not my year of living Talmudically.)

  Ahava responded with a link to Exodus 13:6–10:

  For seven days eat bread made without yeast and on the seventh day hold a festival to the Lord. Eat unleavened bread during those seven days; nothing with yeast is to be seen among you, nor shall any yeast be seen anywhere within your borders. On that day tell your son, “I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.” This observance will be for you like a sign on your hand and a reminder on your forehead that this law of the Lord is to be on your lips. For the Lord brought you out of Egypt with his mighty hand. You must keep this ordinance at the appointed time year after year.

  Well, that settled it.

  I started by vacuuming every room in the house that might contain crumbs . . . which turned out to be all of them, even (for reasons I’d rather not get into here) the bathrooms. Then I mopped the kitchen floor and cleaned all counters and tabletops with hot water. But when it came time to throw all our boxed food into a giant garbage bag, along with all our bread, flour, rice, and pasta, I just couldn’t do it. We weren’t in a financial position to restock our entire kitchen, especially when only half of us were supposed to be living biblically anyway. So instead, I divided everything up, designating some cabinets, drawers, and refrigerator shelves “kosher” and others “not kosher,” attaching yellow sticky notes with all-caps warnings about not mixing anything up, lest the offender be “cast out” of the home.

  As it turns out, my strategy wasn’t completely unprecedented. Although rabbinic tradition forbids Jews from even owning chametz during Passover, the rabbis created a legal process that allowed some chametz to be “retained” during the holiday if finances or logistics make total elimination impractical. In this process, a family authorizes a rabbi to sell their chametz to a non-Jew for the duration of Passover. At the end of the holiday, the sale becomes null and void, and the chametz, which more than likely never left the property, returns to its owners.

  The whole endeavor was a bit slap-bang, but I felt like I’d made a sincere effort, so after a handshake with Dan, I went ahead and recited the traditional pledge: “Any leaven that may still be in the house, which I have not seen or have not removed, shall be as if it does not exist, and as dust of the earth.”

  With the house prepared on Saturday, I made the forty-five-minute drive to Chattanooga on Sunday in search of ingredients for our Seder feast and food to fit my kosher diet. In addition to eliminating chametz for Passover, I decided to stick to the rest of the dietary laws found in the Old Testament as well, in order to eat only that which is considered pure. This meant, among other things, no pork, no shellfish, no mixing of meat and dairy, no wine or grape-juice products made by non-Jews, and no meat, except that which comes from animals slaughtered and prepared according to biblical law.

  According to the Chabad Jewish Center of Chattanooga Web site, the best place in town to find kosher foods was the Publix on East Brainerd Road, so there I went, braving a spring downpour that I hoped wouldn’t stick around for my “tent time.” Sure enough, at Publix I found kosher-for-Passover honey, sea salt, and grape juice, as well as parve butter (parve describes food without any meat or dairy products in it, which can be eaten with meat) and chocolate, and a shelfful of matzo meal, matzo ball soup mix, and matzah bread.

  The matzah (unleavened bread), came in large flat sheets like giant saltine crackers. Publix offered traditional matzah, whole wheat matzah, and egg matzah, so I got two boxes of each for good measure. I even found colorful Passover napkins covered in illustrations of the ten plagues of Egypt so we could wipe our mouths across swarms of locusts and frogs while remembering the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt. I’d crossed most the items off my list within thirty minutes. Eshet chayil!

  But what about the meat?

  I’m at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to selecting good cuts because I get painfully shy around butchers. It’s got something to do with never wanting to bother people, which I guess has something to do with low self-esteem, which I guess has something to do with a repressed childhood memory or something.

  Kosher meat is a complicated affair. Only animals that chew their cud and have cloven hooves are allowed, which rules out pigs and rabbits and a bunch of other animals no one should eat anyway, but which thankfully includes cattle and sheep. Domesticated birds, like chickens and turkeys, are in, but wild fowl and birds of prey are out. Popular cuts of meat, such as sirloin, porterhouse steak, T-bone steak, and filet mignon, are not considered kosher because the Torah forbids the children of Israel from eating the hindquarters of any animal, to honor the story in the Bible where Jacob wrestles with God, limping away from the altercation with a leg injury (Genesis 32:32). A kosher animal must be subjected to a ritual slaughter in keeping with biblical law, providing the swiftest and most humane death possible. The blood must then be removed (Leviticus 7:26) through a process called “soaking and salting,” and the excess fat trimmed off (Leviticus 7:23).

  I had yet to decide what sort of meat I wanted to serve at our Passover Seder. I figured I’d get a look at the selection first. My initial instinct was to roast a leg of lamb, but this turns out to be a common rookie mistake. Jews actually avoid eating roasted meat at Passover, particularly lamb, because they don’t want their guests to think they might be eating the Paschal sacrifice—a lamb traditionally sacrificed and eaten on the eve of Passover in a ritual that ended with the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70.

  I scanned the meats, looking for a tag or sign that said, “KOSHER MEAT HERE!” or that at least included the OU (Orthodox Union) symbol I’d grown accustomed to identifying. No luck. Finally I worked up the courage to ring the bell on the counter and ask the butcher.

  “Do you have any kosher meat?” I asked sheepishly when a stout, middle-aged man in a white apron came out from behind the swinging doors.

  “We sure do!” he said, pointing to the frozen food section. “Right over there.”

  “Oh. You mean you don’t have any fresh kosher meat?”

  “Not here,” he responded with a polite laugh that convinced me I’d just asked a totally stupid question.

  “Well then, where the heck do all the Jews in Chattanooga get their meat?!” I wanted to shout, bu
t didn’t because I hate bothering people.

  So I wandered over to the frozen food section, where I nearly died of cold searching high and low for anything labeled kosher. After about fifteen minutes, I finally saw it: “Meal Mart Breaded Chicken and Turkey Cutlets: Passover Edition.” The food came in a bright-blue box with an enlarged picture of the cutlets on the front and the words “Kosher for Passover” stamped prominently across the bottom along with all the proper kosher labels.

  That little box created a big dilemma. On the one hand, if I served this chicken (and/or turkey) for Passover, I could rest assured that I wasn’t breaking any biblical laws. On the other, we planned to invite guests to our Seder, and what kind of “biblical woman” serves frozen chicken (and/or turkey) cutlets to guests? I knew I should go back to the butcher and ask him if he knew of a local shop that sold kosher meats, but then I read the directions: “Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Arrange cutlets on a baking sheet. Cook for 40 minutes and serve.”

  My Passover Seder had just gotten a lot easier.

  The next stop was the liquor store on the north side of town.

  The Talmud requires that Jews remember their ancestors’ exodus out of Egypt with “no less than four cups of wine.” These four cups symbolize the four redemptions promised by God in Exodus 6:6–7 (paraphrased)—“I will take you out of Egypt,” “I will deliver you from slavery,” “I will redeem you with a demonstration of my power,” “I will acquire you as a nation.” Because Exodus 6:8 includes yet another promise from God—“I will bring you into the land of Israel”—a fifth glass of wine is poured. But the rabbis who wrote the Talmud could not agree on whether this glass should be consumed, because the land of Israel had yet to be restored to them. So they decided to leave the matter to the prophet Elijah; that is, to wait until Elijah returns ahead of the Messiah to clarify issues related to the Law. This compromise is symbolized by a fifth glass of wine, which is poured and left out for Elijah. Traditionally, children present at the Seder open the front door of the house to let Elijah in.