Counting seven clean days: Female-halachic dissonance

One woman wrote to a rabbi in 2021: “It’s terribly frustrating that I feel powerful attraction to my husband specifically in the week of the 7 clean days, with the height of desire occurring on mikveh night, and the following day. After that, my desire slowly fades, until I have no desire whatsoever. So in the second week when we’re allowed to be intimate, I don’t want to be with him. Is there a way to overcome this frustrating obstacle?” 

The rabbi answers that “this is one of the most challenging problems in halacha today, and I’ve written about it at length. Unfortunately, there is no halachic solution.” 

This story highlights two charged and traditionally guarded subjects: the possibility of finding creative solutions within the realm of halacha (Jewish law) when it comes to counting the seven clean days, and the place of female desire within Jewish marriage. 

Orthodox brides-to-be routinely learn that a Jewish wife is obligated to count seven days from the time her period ends until the time she immerses in a mikveh (ritual bath) and resumes relations. For an average of two weeks every month, a woman is off-limits to her husband. What’s challenging is that many women experience ovulation or a rise in libido during the seven days, as the levels of estrogen and testosterone naturally increase. By the time these women go to the mikveh, it’s too late in their cycle to get pregnant, and too late to feel desire, as their hormone levels are on the way down.

What’s apparent from the story above is that although the rabbi is well-versed in halachic literature, he doesn’t understand what this woman feels and cannot relate to her experience. Rabbinic responsa often regulate women’s intimate lives while offering limited acknowledgment of female emotional and sexual perspectives (1).

Fortunately, there are rebbetzins and female halachic advisors who do understand what women experience. The only problem is that most of these women are not authorized to give halachic rulings. The few women who are qualified are unfortunately derided and dismissed by the rabbinate, and sometimes by the husbands as well.

One rebbetzin told me: “For years I’ve been begging rabbis to give the matter serious halachic attention, but it’s not happening.”

The conflict between halacha and medical science

In recent years, medical science has highlighted the role that hormones play in a woman’s cycle. The rising levels of estrogen and testosterone preceding ovulation are also responsible for the increase in a woman’s sex drive (2). Ironically, these two epic moments in female experience can occur in the seven clean days – the halachic time when a woman is not permitted to be with her husband.

Halachic infertility: Ovulation during the 7 days

If a woman ovulates during the seven clean days, before she goes to the mikveh, she cannot get pregnant naturally. This phenomenon is well-known in religious communities, and even has a name: halachic infertility. It’s responsible for about 21% of sterility problems in the observant community (3). The problem becomes more frequent in women over 35, who have much shorter cycles. 

The classic rabbinic answer to halachic infertility does not use halachic methods to find a solution, but rather shifts the onus to medical practitioners. The majority of rabbis propose to solve the problem with medical interventions: either by taking hormones that postpone ovulation to after the seven days, or by the husband’s artificial insemination before his wife goes to the mikveh. Both these interventions are problematic on a number of fronts: taking large amounts of hormones to delay ovulation disrupts the body’s hormonal balance, and artificial insemination is invasive and painful for a couple who are healthy and physically capable of creating a child naturally. What’s more troubling is the assumption that the halachic cycle is more important than a woman’s natural hormonal cycle, or that it’s OK to alter a woman’s body and healthy cycle only because it doesn’t fit the halachic mold.

Shalom bayit: Female desire during the 7 days

Sexual desire isn’t a constant for women, it comes and goes according to natural hormonal fluctuations. This is especially the case for women who are not taking birth control pills – women who stop taking the pill often discover they feel more sexual desire (4). An increase in hormonal levels during the seven clean days is directly related to an increased libido. This is backed up by many studies documenting a general increase in sexual motivation during the peri-ovulatory period (5). The times when a woman wants to be with her husband, and when she doesn’t, can often be attributed to hormonal fluctuations. Unfortunately, these hormonal changes do not always sync with the halachic cycle that determines when husband and wife can be together. Women going through perimenopause from the age of 40+ can experience irregular and short cycles, resulting in physical separation for most of the month.

Many women admit that desiring their husbands during the seven clean days is like wanting “forbidden fruit” – what you can’t have becomes more desirable. In fact, this desire is actually linked to physiological changes: women produce more estrogen and testosterone between the end of menstruation until ovulation, when estrogen levels peak. What women think about is very much influenced by their hormone levels.

Taking women’s desire and putting it on hold until it almost disappears is like putting a gift from God in the sun and watching it melt. What’s more, it causes women severe distress and frustration when they cannot express their sexual selves within their marriage because they’re either off-limits when their libido is high, or finally permitted when their libido is low. 

In the Jewish ketuba (marital contract), men have an obligation to provide onah (sexual relations) to their wives. But what is one to do if a woman’s onah – literally her time – occurs during the seven days? 

This dissonance between halachic and natural hormonal cycles creates tension in a couple who want to keep Jewish law, but who are also attuned to the ups and downs of the female cycle. 

The collateral damage of keeping the seven clean days can be severe especially when it continues over the long-term: tension and strife at home that spills over into the family, lack of shalom bayit (marital harmony), missing the peak days of mutual attraction, guilt and remorse, the possible transgression of Torah law (like having relations with a niddah before she goes to the mikveh), and the alienation of many Jewish couples from observing the laws of family purity. 

Without a halachic solution, either the halacha is compromised or the couple’s entire relationship is compromised.

A custom of the daughters of Israel

The difficulties in keeping the seven days entered public discussion around 2010, when Dr Rosenak, a religious gynecologist, published medical research on the physical and emotional suffering that couples with halachic infertility endure (6). Dr Rosenak proposed a return to Torah law, where a woman counts seven days in total from the beginning of seeing blood until she immerses in a mikveh (Leviticus 15: 25-28). So where do the seven clean days come from?

Counting seven days between the end of bleeding and going to the mikveh was originally a custom (minhag) that the daughters of Israel took upon themselves. Rabbi Zeira, a Talmudic sage, adopted this stringency as a ruling (takanah). This stringency was also seen as a continuation of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi’s ruling that “girls in the fields” (a euphemism for uneducated women) should count seven clean days, the rationale being that they weren’t knowledgeable enough to distinguish between different kinds of bleeding. 

Rabbi Zeira’s stringency eventually became the basis for all family purity laws. Over the years, different halachic authorities have related differently to this ruling. Rabbi Kook, the Chief Rabbi in Israel between 1921-1935, wrote that the “stringency of the seven clean days is even less than a rabbinic prohibition, and if there’s room to be lenient as in the case of pikuach nefesh (saving a life), one may be.” Maimonides also considered this custom to be an excessive stringency.

The fact that the custom was originally conceived by the daughters of Israel begs the question – why did they do it? Was it a natural means of birth control, since they knew that ovulation could occur during the seven days? Was it a gesture of mourning for the destruction of the Temple?

At any rate, once Rabbi Yehuda haNasi and Rav Zeira incorporated this custom into halacha, it became a rabbinic way of enforcing control over women’s bodies and women’s sexuality. The small window of time that women are permitted to be intimate with their husbands is not negotiable, according to most rabbis.

It takes a woman to understand a woman

The world of halacha and its rulings is dominated by male rabbis. Without questioning rabbinic authority in halacha, it seems that many rabbis lack the medical and scientific knowledge to understand what many women actually experience physiologically, endocrinologically, and emotionally during the seven clean days. Without an understanding of how the intricate endocrine system works, a male rabbi has no idea what it’s like to be in a female body during the seven clean days, and remain faithful to halacha at the same time.

It’s also awkward and embarrassing to talk about intimate matters with a male stranger, and even worse to try and explain the scientific basis for hormonal changes to someone who doesn’t want to hear it. 

Rabbanit Rivka Shimon, a marital advisor and bridal instructor, found that a large number of women experience depression during the seven days when they want to be with their husband, while their husbands testify to the tension at home. According to Rabbanit Shimon, “during the seven days, the couple’s intimate space becomes a vacuum. Rebbetzins and halachic advisors receive thousands of requests regarding the seven days, from both young and older women alike. We need a group of rabbis and rebbetzins who know how to give halachic rulings and address this area.”

These are religious women who on the one hand, want to keep halacha, but on the other hand, don’t want to harm their marriage, intimate life, and self by adding a whole extra week of separation. 

Rabbinic silencing 

Halacha, or Jewish law, is supposed to be something to live by; the root meaning of the word is “to go.” Traditionally, people with real-life challenges or dilemmas in the realm of Jewish law would go to a halachic authority for a ruling (psak halacha). As a rule of thumb, learned rabbis are capable of exercising flexibility and leniency in specific cases.

In previous years, those who tried to start a halachic discussion about the seven days have been silenced. When Dr Rosenak brought the issue to the public forum some 15 years ago, it caused a rabbinic backlash across the Orthodox spectrum in Israel.

Rabbis bring a variety of arguments as to why the subject of the seven days is untouchable: any change would undermine the authority of the rabbis, it’s a slippery slope that would lead to other concessions in halacha, what was once a custom now has the status of a law that cannot be changed, or that rabbis don’t have the authority and we have to wait until the Sanhedrin is established.

What’s more, rabbis who are bold to address the difficulty of keeping the seven days are afraid that their rabbinic reputation will be destroyed if they show any leniency. Some even think that the entire edifice of rabbinic authority could crumble. It’s a tragic irony that the possibility of being lenient when it comes to keeping the seven days could harm a rabbi’s legitimacy to rule on halacha. Hence rabbinic silence dominates the public sphere. 

Women who are interested in keeping halacha don’t have to suffer because of rabbinic politics. There are a few Orthodox rabbis who show leniency on a case-by-case basis, but they won’t go public, so it’s not easy to find them. 

Some cases where rabbis have allowed women to go earlier to the mikveh include a mixed religious-secular marriage, secular couples, or those who suffer from halachic infertility. 

If places like the Tzomet Institute can incorporate scientific knowledge into their halachic rulings, such as creative practices that uphold the laws of shabbat in a modern environment, then surely scientific knowledge can and should be integrated into the halachic domain of family purity. For some reason, there’s a glaring disconnect between women’s physiology – the knowledge of our bodies and how they function – and what halacha has to say about it.

Michal Mintzer, a trained instructor for brides and couples, says: “I believe the change will come from below. Already today there’s a significant gap between what the official halachic ruling says, and what’s happening in real life.”

It’s paradoxical that rabbis of previous generations appropriated a custom that Jewish women initiated and gave it the binding force of an immutable law, while today’s generation of rabbis largely refuses to hear what many daughters of Israel are saying about it. 

The book of Judges tells the tragic story of Yiftach’s daughter, who was doomed to a life of celibacy because of a vow her father made. The real tragedy is that the story could have ended differently, but there was a power struggle between Yiftach and Pinchas, the High Priest. Both men thought it beneath their position to ask or tell the other that the vow can be annulled, and so Yiftach’s daughter died unmarried and childless. Similarly, it would be a tragedy if women of today’s generation continue to suffer needlessly because male honour and rigid authority prevent changing the status quo when there is room for leniency.

Hearing women’s voices 

Rav Kook predicted that when no rabbinic figure is bold or knowledgeable enough to show flexibility around decrees, the public will express itself in an outburst.

This is what’s happening today. Women from all parts of the religious spectrum are addressing the halachic-female dissonance of the seven days behind the scenes: in social media groups, in private conversations, and in podcasts from researchers like Dr. Michal Prins, author of It’s My Pleasure: Unlocking Desire in Long-Term Relationships. Dr. Prins sees the discussion about the seven days as important and necessary, even if there’s no immediate halachic solution: “Talking about it validates the feelings of many women and allows them to understand that they’re not alone in their experience. Talking about it publicly invites halachic engagement and conveys the message that this is a collective challenge that needs to be addressed.” Women are finally speaking up about their own experiences.

If halacha is important to you, find rabbis who can address your issue on a case-by-case basis. If one rabbi isn’t familiar with your subject, find a rabbi who is. Ask halachic advisors who can refer you to a rabbi knowledgeable in the area that challenges you. 

Rebbetzins who are qualified to give rulings on family purity have a legitimate place in halachic discourse. If women want the halachic discourse to change, then we need to make sure our voices are heard. It’s women who experience pregnancy, birth, fertility treatments, hormonal fluctuations and everything that’s related to the female body. Women’s voices are heard in every discipline in modern contemporary life at all levels. Only when women’s unique experiences are brought to the halachic discussion, and given the attention they deserve, can we expect to resolve the current dissonance. 

Sources

1. Tsuria, Ruth. “Jewish Q&A online and the regulation of sexuality: Using Foucault to read technology.” Social Media+ Society 2, no. 3 (2016).
2. Cappelletti, Maurand, and Kim Wallen. “Increasing women’s sexual desire: the comparative effectiveness of estrogens and androgens.” Hormones and behavior 78 (2016): 178-193.
3. Haimov-Kochman, Ronit, Chana Adler, Eliana Ein-Mor, Daniel Rosenak, and Arye Hurwitz. “Infertility associated with precoital ovulation in observant Jewish couples; prevalence, treatment, efficacy and side effects.” The Israel Medical Association Journal: IMAJ 14, no. 2 (2012): 100-103.
4. Malmborg, Agota, Elin Persson, Jan Brynhildsen, and Mats Hammar. “Hormonal contraception and sexual desire: A questionnaire-based study of young Swedish women.” The European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care 21, no. 2 (2016): 158-167.
5. Marcinkowska, Urszula M., Talia Shirazi, Magdalena Mijas, and James R. Roney. 2022. “Hormonal Underpinnings of the Variation in Sexual Desire, Arousal and Activity Throughout the Menstrual Cycle – A Multifaceted Approach.” The Journal of Sex Research 60 (9): 1297–1303.
6. Haimov-Kochman, Ronit, Daniel Rosenak, Raoul Orvieto, and Arye Hurwitz. “Infertility counseling for Orthodox Jewish couples.” Fertility and Sterility 93, no. 6 (2010): 1816-1819.