Mayim Rabim

On Avigayil's post "and how are the benefits" there's a discussion in the comments about the different waiting times to be purified from niddah vs from zavah, and Avigayil adds this: At some point 2500 years ago "the women" decided that it was too difficult to keep track of which bleeding was niddah bleeding and which bleeding was zavah bleeding so they took a stringency upon themselves to consider all bleeding zavah bleeding and wait the seven clean days in all cases. This has become the custom, and thus the practice of observant women even today.

From Beneath, among others (myself included), would like to slap these women "upside the head" and Swurgle wants to know why we can't just undo that decision.

So in the interest of clarification, I did a little research into what exactly is the difference between niddah and zava and how can you tell? And my first instinct is to duck and run! You think the current niddah laws are complicated? Here's the link I found. It's a pdf file, and the part about distinguishing between niddah and zava starts on page 5.

Please remember I am not a posek, consult your own Rav, etc., but this is the way I understand the shuir.

To summarize: first you have to decide which opinion you are following. (There seem to be at least two) Let's say you hold by the Rambam. First you have to remember the exact date of your first "discharge," ie period. Anyone? I can tell you how old I was, approximately, and whether it was day or night, but after all, it was about 20 years ago, and I don't even remember which month it was, or what day of the week, much less the exact date! Now why is this date so important? because the Rambam holds that from there you start counting alternating "windows" (the shuir calls them periods, but that's too confusing for me, so I changed it) of 7 days and 11 days, whether or not you experience any bleeding on those days. Are you following so far? Any bleeding that comes during a 7-day window is Dam Niddah (dam is blood) and any bleeding that comes during an 11 day window is Dam Ziva. ("Ziva" blood makes you a "Zava"... the vowels don't really count in Hebrew. They change conjugation and usage but not meaning.)

A bit of halacha on "waiting times": Dam Niddah requires a seven day wait from the first day of blood, as long as bleeding has stopped by that seventh day. Dam Ziva that lasts only 1 or two days requires a one day blood-free wait, but Dam Ziva that lasts three or more days requires sheva neki'im, the seven days of no bleeding at all, before immersing in a mikvah.

To be fair, most poskim make it a little easier than the Rambam does. Any discharge renders you Niddah... the first seven days are all niddah days, then the next 11 are Ziva days, then it goes back to Niddah days (but not back again) so you wouldn't really become a Zava unless your cycle was less than 18 days long. At this point I was beginning to think it wasn't so difficult after all, and we really should go back to distinguishing between niddah and zava. Then I noticed something from an earlier page in the shuir that I'd glossed over the first time I read it. The point about what exactly is "Dam Niddah."

It sounds like the real killer, the real reason we don't distinguish anymore, has nothing to do with Niddah vs Zava days, but everything to do with colors. Yes, colors. To insure that blood is really Dam Niddah, it not only needs to come during the "Dam Niddah Days," but it also needs to be one of 5 very specific shades of blood that are actually tamei (impure). Without showing every single stain to a Rav trained in distinguishing those colors(all of which are different reds, by the way), a woman wouldn't know for sure that the blood qualified as Dam Niddah.

For that reason, the Rebbeim instituted that where there is no such trained Rav available in a community, women must do the following:

For a one day discharge, a woman is almost definitely a Zava Katana, ("little Zava")which would require one blood-free day before visiting the mikvah. However, just in case it really was Dam Niddah, she waits the full seven days of Niddah (not seven blood-free days, just seven days, but since this was from a one-day discharge, 6 of them are blood-free)

For a two day discharge, she waits 8 days, in case the first day was Dam Ziva, and the second day was Dam Niddah, so the seven day minimum starts from the second day.

For a three or more day discharge, she probably becomes a Zava Gedolah, a "big" zava, which necessitates the sheva neki'im, or seven non-bleeding days. If any of the blood is really Dam Niddah, the seven day waiting period is included within this by default.

Eventually it became the custom to hold by sheva neki'im even for one day's discharge, on the basis that it was too confusing otherwise. Now that last bit doesn't seem reasonable to me... but I do see how it might be confusing, and, after all, I didn't make the rules.

Okay, everyone take a deep breath. Just one more thing I want to mention.

No one said anything about a 5 day minimum before starting the sheva neki'im, right? Doesn't appear in the shuir at all. So where does that come from? How did we get from even with being extra stringent, 7, 8, or 10+ (if you bleed for 3 or more) days to a minimum of 12? Well, it seems you can't count a day as a "clean day" if you are dripping... semen. This is where the math gets very funky. The sages tell us that after sex, you drip semen for up to three days. Semen being clear, you can't tell by looking at a bedikah cloth (without a microscope) whether it is present. So you need to wait three days before starting sheva neki'im. Wait, but 3 days isn't 5! Even assuming you don't have eden's mazel, and had sex 5 minutes before you became niddah, that's still only 3 days! Well, see, for the 5 days, 1 minute before sunset counts as a whole day of bleeding. But the 3 days of dripping are really 72 hours, so that could halachically stretch over pieces of 4 days, and if the days are in the process of getting shorter, (during the time of year where it drops by over a minute a day) and you time it just right, those 72 hours could possibly overlap a tiny piece into a 5th halachic day. (I think... I didn't actually do the math, but I think that's what I remember.) So Chazal threw in that extra day just for fun. That's why Kallahs only need to wait 4 and not 5... the 5th day is a stringency. Also today's Rebbeim can play with the 5 day thing in cases of need. And the whole thing is moot if you didn't actually have relations right before you started bleeding, but apparently that's too much to expect us to keep track of as well.

So I'm still not a posek, and those of us who agreed to follow halacha l'maaseh (practical halacha) as it stands are kind of stuck, but as an intellectual exercise, now you have all the details for figuring out what the "real" halachic way to do things was before Chazal started taking pity on us poor math and memory challenged women and making it more difficult so it would be less confusing for us.

And yes, it is confusing, and yes, it is a lot to keep track of, and yes, we are all busy women who can't remember from one end of the sheva neki'im to the other which day we made the hefsek taharah on... but that's why we keep calendars, right? So keep in mind most women were basically illiterate during the times of Chazal, and even if they could write they didn't have (and couldn't have afforded anyway) our neat little pocket calendars and a pencil, and then maybe it all makes sense.

And if anyone wants to challenge my reasoning and/or math, or correct any mistakes I've made, go right ahead. I'm not any sort of expert, I've just done a bit of reading on the subject.