teshuva-writing collective

Genderqueer Torah on Niddah: Jewish Practices of

Sacred Sexuality for Nonbinary Folks & People of All

Genders

Written by Jericho Vincent

Besiyata diShmaya

Cheshvan 5783 | August 2022

This teshuva aims to pass the Kranjec Test

She’eilah

I’m AFAB and I recently came out as trans nonbinary. When I lived as a woman, I had a

practice of niddah–sexual abstinence around my period and immersing in the mikvah after

my period. As a nonbinary person, am I still obligated in the practice of niddah? I guess

what I’m asking is this: is niddah a menstruation practice or a woman’s practice? And if I

start testosterone or lose my period due to testosterone, would that alter my status or

obligation?

I do long for a practice of sacred sexuality rooted in Jewish ancestral wisdom and I’ve found

my niddah practice meaningful, but I’m ambivalent about continuing a woman’s practice.

I’m also anxious about navigating the mikvah in my community. I no longer feel comfortable

immersing in the women’s mikvah, and I don’t think I’d be welcomed in the men’s mikvah

—and as a genderqueer person I’m not sure that either is truly the place for me.

Plonyx

Teshuva

Thank you for your query, Plonyx. The hishtoqequt, or sacred longing, within you to have a

practice of sacred sexuality is holy and your desire to balance ancestral wisdom with the

truth of your experience is noble. It is an honor to be present with you in this place. I’ll do

my best to honor the will of El Chai,

the living God for whom our souls thirst, in my

response.

I prepare this teshuva by calling on my lineage as a genderqueer nonbinary trans Ashkanazi

Renewal Jew with familial and spiritual roots in the litvish and chasidic communities, and by

Psalm 42:3

calling on my love of the Divine within us, around us, and beyond us. Vihi noam Adonai

Eloheynu aleynu.

May the favor of Adonai, our Power, be upon us in this process!

Deﬁning Terms

In 1983, Dr. Susanna Heschel declared that the “problem” of feminism in Judaism was not

feminism per se, but the weakness of Jewish theological responses to modernity, which are

thrown into relief by the challenge of feminism.

The powerful inverse of this truth is that Dr. Heschel, her colleagues, and other feminists

before and since then, have not only opened the portal to a holier feminist Judaism, they

have also helped Judaism develop robust theological responses to modernity that are

applicable to Jews of all genders.

A similar dynamic is at play when it comes to genderqueer Jews. The “problems” that

genderqueer folks grapple with in Judaism illuminate larger unaddressed problems in

Judaism. The Torah-true solutions that we explore as genderqueer Jews oﬀer possibilities

for healing and for growth that will beneﬁt Jews of all genders, bringing all of us that much

closer to the Divine within us, around us, and beyond us.

In the words of Ariel Vegosen, a gender-expansive Kohenet:

My community and I are the tzitzit (fringe) on the tallit. We are on the margins, on the

edge…Those on the edge bring new ideas, visions, creativity, and excellence to those in the center.

I hope this exchange might do some of that, so while I want to address you directly and I

want to center trans experience, I also want to make space for non-trans folks to travel

along with us in this exploration. To that end, let’s ﬁrst lay out some basic terms for those

who might not be familiar with them:

Vegosen, Ariel. “The Beautiful Fringe.” Essay. In Liberaring Gender for Jews and Allies: The Wisdom of Transkeit,

edited by Jane Rachel Litman and Jakob Hero-Shaw. Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge

Scholars Publishing, 2022.

Heschel, Susannah. “Introduction.” Introduction. In On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader, edited by Susannah

Heschel, xxiv. New York: Schocken Books, 1983.

Psalm 90:17

Sex is a socially constructed category that refers to externally observed physical

characteristics of a body. In Judaism, there are six sexes: zachar, nekevah,

androgynos, tumtum, aylonit, and saris.

In Western culture, we have three sexes:

male, female, and intersex.

Gender is a socially constructed category that is aﬃrmed via a felt sense of inner

truth. At least seven genders appear in ancestral Judaism: zachar, nekevah, aylonit

adam, saris adam, dachar vnukvah, nikevah tisavov gever, ish biguf nikeva.

There are

many many genders in Western culture.

Trans or transgender is an umbrella term that refers to folks whose gender identity

doesn’t match the gender identity that they were assigned at birth. AFAB stands for

Assigned Female at Birth (AMAB, Assigned Male at Birth). Some trans folks were

assigned male, but are in fact female, and some trans folks were assigned female

and are in fact male, but lots of trans folks are nonbinary, which means they

experience their gender as neither male nor female.

There are all kinds of ways to be nonbinary. Some nonbinary folks experience

themselves as a collection of distinct genders that exist sequently (eg sometimes

they are male, sometimes they are genderqueer, sometimes they are female). Other

nonbinary folks have a steady gender identity that is neither male nor female, but

instead a blend of male and female, diﬀerent than male or female, or not a gender

at all.

Some nonbinary folks use they/them pronouns, others use he/him or she/her,

others use neopronouns, others switch depending on the gender they are in that

moment or other factors.

Genderqueer refers to folks who don’t subscribe to traditional western gender

roles. Not all trans folks are genderqueer (some trans men, for example, might not

be genderqueer, they might follow a traditional western gender identity of “man”),

and not all genderqueer folks are trans (a woman who is a tomboy might identify as

genderqueer but not trans).

Stein, Abby, trans. “(Trans)Gender in Judaism: From Creation to Kabbalah and Hasidus.” Sefaria. Accessed

December 23, 2022. https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/121702.5?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en.

These six, which appear in the Talmud, have often been described as genders, but since they are traditionally

mapped by external observation of the body and its functions and not personal aﬃrmation or internal state,

“gender” seems an inaccurate translation that gives our Talmudic ancestors more credit than they are due. Our

Talmudic ancestors understood six categories of being that were ascertained by emission type, genitalia, and

secondary sex characteristics. There is no evidence that they recognize categories of being that were produced

by personal aﬃrmation alone.

This is a very partial list of terms. For those who are new to all this:

● There’s a lot more to explore.

● Sefaria and Google are your friends.

● May the genderqueer God who is sometimes a Woman in Labor

and sometimes a

Formative Father

and sometimes male and female both

and sometimes, in the

words of poet Joy Ladin, stranded in the wilderness beyond human categories,

guide

you on your learning journey.

Power Analysis and Positionality

Each of us can only judge what we see with our own eyes. Each of us, and certainly every

posek, every decider of Jewish law, has a perspective that is limited, what is traditionally

called aniyut daati.

Life is as inﬁnitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us, Brother Kafka

said. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one’s personal existence. But

through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.

I’m going to respond to your question from my positionality, trying to be as clear as I can.

When I consider the issues involved in your query, this is what I see from my keyhole:

I see a mess. I see an opportunity. I see a complicated knotty situation that will take some

patience to work through. If we’re willing to invest that patience, this process might oﬀer

great rewards not only about nidda, but about life, and not only for us, but for all people.

Here’s a snapshot of some our complications:

A teshuva is traditionally made up of four ingredients: (1) a series of rules and

principles, (2) precedent, (3) communal practice, and (4) curation. (This is my

back-of-the-napkin analysis, because I haven’t seen it described concisely

elsewhere—there seems to be a kind of taboo against discussing how halacha, our

sacred paths or systems of spiritual imperatives, actually work. To be clear—there’s

Janouch, Gustav. “Introduction.” Introduction. In Conversations with Kafka, translated by Goronwy Rees, 2. New

York, NY: New Directions, 2012.

Ladin, Joy. “In the Image of God, God Created Them: Toward Trans Theology.” Journal of Feminist Studies in

Religion 34, no. 1 (2018): 54.

Genesis 1:27

Isaiah 64:7

Isaiah 42:14-16

plenty written about the halachic system– but almost all of it is about how the

system likes to talk about itself, not about how it actually works in practice.)

Ingredient number one isn’t overly complex for us. There are a series of rules and

principles

that every teshuva will explicitly or implicitly call upon. These include

things like Darchei Shalom—we make decisions that promote peace, Shinui

HaIttim—we update laws for changing times, and Rov HaKahal—if a law is neglected

or contested by most people, it becomes invalidated.

Every posek decides which of

the many possible rules and principles to emphasize (that’s #4, curation), but I don’t

see any special complications in this ingredient due to the content of this particular

query.

Ingredient number two, precedent, things begin to get murky. Very murky. It is

heart-breaking, but while there are some powerful trans-aﬃrming statements in our

sacred texts

and in our mystical tradition, the preponderance of halachic

precedent is trans-excluding, if not transphobic.

Disability activists taught us: nothing about us without us, a principle with deep roots

in our ancestral tradition.

How can we include a historical ruling as an authority in

our attempt to arrive at truth for you, a spirit that is trans, if that ruling excluded or

worse, silenced, trans authority?

Audre Lorde warned us, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Which is not to say that I’m unsympathetic to the urge to try. And sometimes using

the master’s tools to validate the existence of the oppressed is necessary and even

valorous. But if we pull in transphobic precedent without intentionality, without

caveats, we risk lending unGodly ﬁgures and unGodly systems, already bloated with

power, an unconscious stamp of approval from trans scholarship and trans voices.

It’s a diﬃcult business.

Our ancestors weren’t unaware or ignorant to the kind of dilemma we’re facing.

They actually built a failsafe into the legal system. The law says…

Soloman, Laynie and Pearce, Russell G. (2022) "‘Nothing About Us Without Us’: Toward a Liberatory

Heterodox Halakha," Touro Law Review: Vol. 37: No. 4, Article 7. Available at:

https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/lawreview/vol37/iss4/7

A favorite is Isaiah 56:4-5 where righteous trans women are promised a “name everlasting” better than sons

and daughters

Mishnah Torah Hilchot Mamrim 2:6

As outlined in the books Not in Heaven by Eliezer Berkovits (Shalem Press, 1983) and The Halakhic Process: A

Systematic Analysis by Joel Roth (The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1986).

לָפּ

דטָפּ

…

תא

םי

ה־ל

אה

יםי

הָתּ

ודי

אר

ד׃טָפּ

When a matter arises that confounds you… you shall go to the priests, levites, and to the

judges who are there in those days and inquire and they will tell you the law.

“In those days.” There’s a temporality to the law. The original legal system weighed

judgment of the moment far more heavily than precedent, as if to conﬁrm that our

understanding of morality is always evolving. Of course we’d want our formations of

our spiritual imperatives to keep up. The rabbis echoed this commitment in a

directive that they repeated a number of times:

ןי

דן

לא

אה

מוי

ני

וא

ור

A judge can only judge what they see with their own eyes

It seems based on these sacred texts that precedent shouldn’t be a signiﬁcant factor

at all for this teshuva or any other, so no need to fret about the quality of our

available precedent in your particular case. But it’s a little more complicated than

that.

As the rabbinic revolution consolidated power in the ﬁrst half of the ﬁrst

millennium, the rabbinic system began to slowly increase their reliance on

precedent, curating their sources primarily from decisions made by folks who were

no longer alive. The importance of lived experience or the Divine imperative of this

particular moment began to lose centrality. Authority began to consolidate in the

past.

This backwards-looking paralysis can be understood as a trauma reaction. Trauma

can freeze us. Trauma can leave us ﬁxated on what’s been. Trauma can rob us of the

playful and attentive agility required by presence in the now.

So what do we do? Do we do things the more ancient way and disregard precedent,

reinventing how a teshuva is written? Do we do things the “traditional” way and use

problematic precedent?

Further complications:

In the Mishnah Torah, Maimonides’ 12th century canonical code of Jewish law,

positive mitzvah #177 states:

Bava Basra 131a, Nidda 20b, Sanhedrin 6b

Deuteronomy 17:8-9

תוושהלןיבילעבןינידהעשבןידמועש,ןידב:רמאנש,קדצב"טופשת"ךתימעארקיו).(וט,טי

To treat litigants equally when they appear to be judged, as [Leviticus 19:15] states:

Judge your kin with righteousness

An authority who cannot treat a trans person with equal dignity to a cis person

would be violating this imperative if they attempted to pass judgment on some

element of trans life. According to this imperative, can we include such an authority

in a lawful curation of a response to a trans shiela?

Furthermore, in Pirkei Avos we’re told:

אןי

דָתּת

עי

גַתּ

ומ

וק

Do not judge your friend until you stand in their place

If a cis trans-aﬃrming person has never experienced what it is to be trans, does this

directive exclude even a cis trans-aﬃrming person from oﬀering any kind of

judgment on a trans person’s life?

Now let’s consider our third ingredient, communal practice. Which communal

practice is relevant here? The practice of the cis dominated geographic community

or lineage you belong to? Or is that irrelevant– is the reference for your communal

practice the practice of the global trans community or the practice of our Jewish or

spiritual trans lineage?

And ﬁnally, our fourth ingredient, curation: who gets to curate a trans teshuva?

Which sources should be a part of that curation? Is there something about the

curation itself that might need to be queered to get at the truth of this trans Torah

we are seeking?

We are fortunate. There are more living trans Jewish scholars today than there ever were,

but with so few openly trans or trans-aﬃrming authorities captured in our historical sacred

texts, you can see that we could be dramatically limited in the pool of ancestral sources

that we might draw upon. We may have to curate our teshuva in a way that is halachically

problematic in that it heavily prejudices authorities who are not alive today and not

aﬃrming of trans folks and not trans themselves.

Let us at least acknowledge that it is so.

And not just for our own sakes. As sibling Jack Halberstam says:

Pirkei Avos 2:4

…[N]o one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing “this shit down” until they realize

that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us.

To be clear, I don’t want to tear the structure of halacha down, but I do want to frankly face

its spiritual inadequacies and begin to heal them. And not just to help trans folks, but for

the beneﬁt of people of all genders who are harmed by these shortcomings. Cis hegemony

hurts cis people, too. Cis hegemony is not Godly.

The Kranjec Test asks that any Jewish source sheets with more than two sources include at

least one non-male source. Perhaps at the very least we need a new test that requires that

any teshuva on trans issues that has two or more sources include at least one trans voice.

But for you, I want more than that. I want to keep all of these complications in mind and I

want to avoid the temptation to give you a conﬁdent facile answer and I want to create this

teshuva curating not straight, but curating queerly. I want to try to compose a teshuva that

is queer not only in content, but also in form, to, in the words of theologian Patrick S.

Cheng,

engage with a methodology that challenges and disrupts the status quo. So I want to

chart a queer path and I also want to ask you to walk that queer path with me, wandering

with me through a meandering landscape, grappling with our complications, together

seeking a Torah truth.

I make that request for three reasons.

First, it’s a queer request: asking the person asking the shiela to wander with the posek. A

traditional teshuva is pretty hierarchical. The posek, the curator, is decisive and clear, lays

out a path that implies this is the only path the person asking the shiela should walk.

Inviting you into the rambles of my spiritual process disrupts that hierarchy.

Second, there are many halachot, many sacred paths. As far as I understand the will of our

living Goddess, it isn’t necessary that you or any other reader ascribe to this particular

halacha, delivered in the psak, the ruling, at the end, if it doesn’t resonate with the truth of

your soul. But I do think any halacha does need to grapple with some of the complex messy

issues that I’ll attempt to lay out here.

And ﬁnally, perhaps most importantly, the third reason I want to ask you to walk this

meandering path with me, is this:

If you will walk with me, then there will be at least two trans folks present every step along

the way—you and me.

Cheng, Patrick S. In Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology New York, NY: Seabury Books, 2011.

Harney, Stefano, Fred Moten, and Jack Halberstam. “The Wild Beyond: with and for the Undercommons.”

Introduction. In The Undercommons Fugitive Planning & Black Study, 10. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013.

And if we count The Holy One Blessed be Them, who is always present but particularly so

when we talk Torah, this, a Divine presence who we are told has a nonbinary character,

then we make three. And that’s a pretty good third. As transgender activist sibling Leslie

Feinberg pointed out: Strength, like height, is measured by who you're standing next to.

So maybe we don’t have the wealth of ancestral resources that are trans-aﬃrming enough

to be legally relevant for your question. We are three consciousnesses, you, me, and the

Divine. In our ancestral tradition, three consciousnesses acting with intention can form a

beis din, a Jewish court.

Three consciousnesses acting with intention have the power to lay down the law.

NIDDAH: A MENSTRUATION MITZVAH OR A WOMAN’S MITZVAH?

You ask: is niddah a women’s mitzvah or a menstruation mitzvah?

For the very ﬁrst time, trans scholars are weighing in on this question in brilliant

explorations of ancient sacred texts and contemporary lived experiences. In Shyla: Are trans

women obligated in niddah? How can that obligation be fulﬁlled?, Rabbi Xava De Cordova,

discussing trans women’s practice of niddah, concludes that niddah is a women’s mitzvah.

In The Androgynos in the Laws of Milah and Niddah: A Potential Approach to Trans Halakhah,

Alyx Bernstein aﬃrms that niddah is limited only to women in cisgender-heterosexual

couples.

Before I share my own response to your question, I’d like to take you along on a tour of

some of our source texts. If we go back to the ﬁrst geological layer of sacred text, the ﬁve

books of the Torah, we ﬁnd two sets of directions around sex and bleeding. They contradict

each other.

In Leviticus 18, amidst a laundry list of sexual prohibitions against incest, beastiality, and

gay sex that too closely mimicks heterosexual sex–we are told:

א־ל

בהּ

טא

לב

תת

ל׃הּ

A woman who is in her menstrual tamei status, do not come near her to uncover her

nakedness.

In this selection, there is no parallel instruction for men who have had seminal emissions.

Leviticus 18:19

Feinberg, Leslie. Essay. In Stone Butch Blues, 381. Firebrand Books, 2020

But a few chapters earlier, in Leviticus 15, the guidance is diﬀerent. After a selection of

instructions for navigating penile discharges and the tamei status that they convey, we start

with instructions for a man who has a healthy seminal emission:

שי

ת־י

ז־ת

ום

ור

ב־ל

כ־ת

ו׃ב

ה־ד

When a man has a seminal emission, he shall bathe his whole body in water and be

tamei until evening.

The woman this man has sex with must also bathe in water and remain tamei until

evening.

The text then immediately turns to a woman and her healthy ﬂow:

ת־י

זם

דה

יהּ

זהּ

םי

יה

הִתּהּ

ה־ל

הּ

בא

י…ב

ה־ד

עם

וב

שי

הּ

אי

והּ

נוי

עא

ות

םי

יב

ה־ל

י־ר

וי

ע׃א

And a woman who has a ﬂow of blood, she shall be a niddah for seven days, and

whoever touches her shall be tamei until evening... And if a man lies with her, her

niddah applies to him; he shall be tamei seven days...

It is understood that it is a normal practice for men to have sex with women who are

menstruating, and just as a woman acquires a male’s tamei status if she is with him when

he has a seminal emission, and she follows his protocol of tamei until evening, a man

acquires a woman’s tamei status if he is with her when she has a menstrual ﬂow, and he

follows her protocol of seven days of tamei status.

I understand the Torah as a Divinely-inspired body of knowledge but it is clearly ﬁltered

through the minds of men, many men, men who had diﬀerent agendas at diﬀerent times.

From these contradictory texts we can infer that for some of our ancestors, a woman who

was menstruating was sexually forbidden to her partner. (Or at the very least, that was the

ruling according to the author of these texts. It’s possible that our female ancestors had

their own code of behaviors that were uninterested in conforming to this author’s sense of

the law.) For other ancestors, or at some other time, a menstruating woman was permitted

to engage in sex while conveying her contagious tamei status to her partner– or perhaps

this ruling was an expression of an always present female practice that this Biblical author

and not the other was willing to accept.

Leviticus 15:124

Leviticus 15:19, 24

Leviticus 15:18

Leviticus 15:16

More importantly, states of tamei and tahor applied both to men and to women, based on

each of their bodily ﬂows. Looking at this oldest layer of sacred text, we could say these

states—and therefore niddah—is not a particularly female practice, it’s a practice that has

something to do with purity and bodily ﬂow or emission, and maybe something to do with

sex.

But this is not the case today. For over a thousand years, men have not accepted tamei

status after seminal emissions and they have not accepted a requirement to immerse after

an emission. Women, on the other hand, seem to have acquired more and more

restrictions based on their tamei status and more stringent immersion requirements since

that time.

What happened?

In the Mishnah Torah’s 12th century accounting of our Divine imperatives, we have a

vestige of evidence of the one time inclusion of men in these practices. From Maimonides’

perspective, positive mitzvah #99 says:

תויהלהדינההאמטהאמטמו.םירחאל

For [a woman in the] niddah state to be impure and to impart tamei status to others

And Positive Mitzvah #105 says:

תויהלתבכשערז.האמטמ

For semen to impart tamei status

But even by that point, the practice of our male ancestors no longer matched the

imperatives of the texts that they wrote.

First, the Talmud, half a millennium before the Mishnah Torah, insisted (despite textual

evidence to the contrary) that the original law in the Torah about seminal emissions making

men impure was only meant to apply to men who wanted to eat from Temple sacriﬁces.

This kind of bold and creative reinterpretation is part of what keeps our tradition vibrant,

but the rabbis neglected to extend a parallel understanding to women and their impurity.

No reason is oﬀered for this discrepancy.

(Our beloved ancestors who starred in, wrote, and compiled the Talmudic texts maintained

troubling lacks of awareness spots when it came to girls and women, who they saw as a

deﬁcient in intelligence,

and available for sexual intercourse from the age of three years

Medrash Tanchuma Vayikra 22:6; Shabbat 33b; Yalqut Shimoni 98:2

Bava Kamma 82b

and one day old.

These attitudes might have been comparable with those of their

non-Jewish contemporaries, but that doesn’t make them legitimate, let alone sacred. We

can acknowledge this. It has always been the Jewish way to recognize our ancestors as

ﬂawed and holy, both.)

The Talmud explains that when Ezra the Scribe came along in the 5th century BCE, he

“expanded” the laws on seminal impurity, insisting that a man who was tamei from a

seminal emission had to immerse not just to eat from Temple sacriﬁces but also before

learning Torah. (Note the ways that this “expansion” continues to adjust the purpose of the

law from one of physical or sexual awareness to one of respect for Torah learning, a

male-centered ritual.) Ezra’s shift is part of what’s called Takanas Ezra, the ordinance of

Ezra. However, at a later point, this entire practice of immersion after seminal emissions

was abandoned by men. They just didn’t want to do it anymore. So the rabbis nulliﬁed the

law.

The nulliﬁcation of a law due to its abandonment by the people is a principle that exists

within the halachic process. In the Mishneh Torah we are told:

ור

תי

בןי

דה

של

הָקּ

הןי

וכ

יד

ל.הּ

בר

ור

וקְפּ

קִפּ

ההּ

בא

וה

שָפּב

בל

הָקּ

וז

בן

ני

וןי

לת

אם

הת

ל:הּ

If a court issued a decree, thinking that the majority of the community could uphold it

and after the decree was issued, the majority of the community raised contentions and

the practice did not spread throughout the majority of the community, the decree is

nulliﬁed. The court cannot compel the people to accept it.

It’s interesting to note that just as most men abandoned their practices regarding ﬂow,

most women today have abandoned their practices regarding ﬂow,

and therefore,

according to the logic of how this dictum has been applied, one might conclude that the

entire practice is nulliﬁed for people of all genders.

To be clear, I’m not actually trying to nullify the practice of niddah. Punkt farr kert, it is

precisely the opposite. Spoiler alert: I actually think there’d be value in more people

Pew studies don’t ask about niddah, but with only 39% of Jews often or sometimes marking Shabbos and only

20% of Jews attending shule at least monthly, this seems like a reasonable deduction. Mitchell, Travis. “3. Jewish

Practices and Customs.” Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project. Pew Research Center, October 6,

2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-practices-and-customs/

Mishnah Torah Hilchot Mamrim 2:6

Shulchan Aruch Harav. Orach Chayim, 88:1

Yevamot 57b

practicing a Torah-true niddah. But sometimes people talk about halacha as if it is an

unyielding immutable thing. There’s a sense of constriction in the system. It’s

understandable. Our people have endured much trauma and trauma engenders paralysis.

It makes sense that our trauma burden might lead us to a view that our tradition is rigid

and unchanging. But we are told that this is not the truth. We are told that our tradition is

an etz chayim, a living tree. It changes, it evolves, it is responsive to the moment. When we

try to discern the correct halacha, the correct way to go, the path that is illuminated by

Divine grace, we should know that there is spaciousness woven into that practice. There is

spaciousness built into the very foundations of our legal/moral/spiritual system.

HaRav Dayan Daniel Siegel says: [H]alachah is the dynamic and ﬂexible process by which we

determine how to respond to contemporary life in the light of Sinai.

Given this background, is niddah a menstruation practice or a woman’s practice?

At its roots, what we call a niddah practice today did have a parallel male practice, so there

was something beyond gender in the formulation of these laws. While niddah eventually

became a woman’s practice, our more ancient ancestors conceived it as part of a practice

that was applicable to people of all genders.

This is a nuanced truth. I want you to know that the practice of niddah can be yours, no

matter your gender. But I don’t want to do that while erasing our more recent female

ancestors. Because the truth is that historically these laws did evolve away from an

all-gender practice and towards a practice of policing women. This might be consequential

for you if you don’t want to take on a female practice. But I also think it’s consequential for

our understanding of the practice overall, no matter what choice you or anybody else

makes for themselves.

Today, many women have reclaimed practices around niddah, tahara, and mikvah and

there is power in that choice. But es pas nisht, it does not beﬁt us, to reclaim the practice

without pausing for a moment to make space for the sorrow this practice has inﬂicted on

some of our people.

Niddah has misogyny baked into it. It’s a hard thing to name, but it is true. And it’s

important to name the truth. Truth, after all, is the seal of God.

We can love our ancestors

even as we hold them accountable for their missteps. In fact, that’s the only way to love

them. Our sacred texts say: Love that is without rebuke is not love.

Beraishis Rabbah 54:3

Shabbat 55a; Yoma 69b; Sanhedrin 64a

Siegel, Daniel. Ms. Moon: White Sliver of Shechina's Return. Aleph, n.d.

A little known fact: In 1171, the Jewish women of Egypt in the rabbinic community were so

outraged by the extraneous niddah practices inﬂicted on them by the men in their lives,

they collectively abandoned those practices to adopt a more ﬂexible mikvah practice that

better met their spiritual needs. In response, the nagid, the leader of the Rabbinic

community, one Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, more commonly known as Maimonides, ruled

that any woman who did not follow the laws the men had written would be swiftly divorced

and denied the alimony stipulation legally due to her as per her ketubah, her marriage

contract. Threatened with unlawful economic ruin and the destruction of their families, the

women acquiesced.

I feel the spirits of these female ancestors of ours close at hand as we

explore this topic here.

Although some women today treasure their niddah practice, others still experience it as an

oppressive and traumatic practice. In the words of Hannah Wenger Tam:

…[N]iddah is not a woman’s mitzvah at all, but rather a way in which my privacy is invaded and

my body controlled by others.

From an anonymous

online blog:

My life has moved on

And part of my secular OTD

life

Means I can choose

How to live my life

And not be forced to do things

I don’t want to do

Ever….

As for Mikva

Or nidda laws

Never

Ever

Again.

And yes in my life

OTD is short for Oﬀ the Derech, or ex-ultra-Orthodox

The frequent anonymity of critical postings on this subject might reﬂect the lack of space to discuss these

contentions within communities where this practice is the norm—an injustice to acknowledge in communities

seeking to revive a niddah practice

Wenger Tam, Hannah. “My Body for Myself.” NY Jewish Week, December 9, 2020.

Berkovits, Rahel. “Maimonides.” Jewish Women's Archive, July 12, 2021.

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/maimonides.

And my world

And my experience

It IS barbaric

It IS inhumane.

Another anonymous post:

…mikvah makes me so angry. It feels like it was designed to keep women pregnant. It

makes me feel ashamed of my body. I hate getting my period. I hate having a random

rebbetzin watching me dunk naked in a pool and telling me that my dunking is “kosher.”

The whole process feels gross to me and makes me feel terrible. And the fact that you

have no choice as a woman not to do it is so degrading. If you want to be married and

have kids you have to do this. Its gross.

As we seek to ﬁnd our own sacred way, I don’t want to steamroll past these holy women,

our beloved sisters, siblings, and ancestors.

Let us pause. Let us take a breath. Let us call to mind their suﬀering and their helplessness,

and for some, their hishtoqequt, their yearning for a practice that didn’t harm them, for a

practice that could instead bring them closer to the Divine.

In the names of our ancestors and our sisters and our siblings may justice well up like water,

righteousness like a perpetual stream.

It is diﬃcult to allow this uncomfortable pain to coexist alongside our exploration, as part

of it. I think it is our duty to be present with this diﬃculty.

This is a lot to digest. I think it’s worth us spending some time with the misogynistic

elements of niddah, personally and communally.

When we give lived experience its due, it becomes harder to argue that niddah is not a

woman’s practice. As a nonbinary person, if you don’t experience yourself as a woman,

niddah might not be relevant to your spiritual life. (Or, depending on the particulars of your

identity, if you occasionally experience yourself as a woman, it might only be relevant

during those times.)

Amos 5:24

Anonymous. “Mikvah Blues.” r/Exjew (blog), 2020.

https://www.reddit.com/r/exjew/comments/mpiwcn/mikvah_blues/

“Marital Intimacy and Mikvah Within an Abusive Marriage.” Diary of an OTD Girl (blog), April 3, 2016.

https://diaryofanotdgirl.wordpress.com/2016/04/03/marital-intimacy-and-mikvah-within-an-abusive-marriage/.

But now that we’ve laid out all of this history and framing, I’d like to approach your question

of whether or not niddah is a women’s practice from a radically diﬀerent direction:

Let us assume for a moment that niddah is a woman’s practice. In the consensus of the

pious, we now understand that women are as fully human and fully Jewish as men.

Therefore, we allow women full access to rights, rituals, and responsibilities previously

reserved for men. This was codiﬁed by the Reform movement in 1944

and in the

Conservative movement in 2001

--- although we need no human system to grant women

human rights denied by men but given to them by the Divine.

But here’s the rub: if women are truly spiritually equal to men, and we give women access

to the male world, then must we not also give men access to a female world?

In the poem “Ode of Girl’s Things,” Sharon Olds speaks to this truth, accepted within secular

feminism, in particularly poignant terms:

…And it turned out

you shared some things with boys—

the alphabet was not just theirs—

and you could make forays over into their territory,

you could have what you could have because it was yours,

and a little of what was theirs, because

you took it. Much later, you’d have to give things

up, too, to make it fair—long

hair, skirts, even breasts, a pair

of raspberry colored pumps which a friend

wanted to put on, if they would ﬁt his foot, and they did.

If we give women the keys to the men's sanctuary but do not give men the keys to the

women’s sanctuary, we imply that the women's sanctuary is of lesser value and meaning.

Do we believe that authority and kedusha, sanctity, lie only in the lineage of men? If we

Olds, Sharon. “Ode to Girl's Things.” Essay. In Odes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

“THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Rabbinical Assembly, in Convention assembled, encourages all

branches of Conservative Judaism to support full equality of all Jews, regardless of gender, in every area of

religious and community life…” Geller, Myron S. Rep. Woman Is Eligible to Testify. Committee on Jewish Law and

Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly, n.d.

The Reform movement completes the process of the increasing rights of women and declares women equal

in all legal religious matters to men.” Freehof, Solomon Bennett. Essay. In Reform Jewish Practice: And Its Rabbinic

Background, 52. Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1944.

believe the work of women and the wisdom of women are equal to the work and wisdom

of men, surely men should be given the opportunity to practice some form of niddah and

mikvah just as much as women should be given the opportunity to wear tzitzit.

Now, should—and in what ways may—niddah be an opportunity for men or an equal

“obligation”? How do we evaluate this question in the reverse direction—for those who

believe men are obligated to wear yarmulkes, are women required to wear yarmulkes or do

they simply have the opportunity to if they so desire? Torah scholar Rabbi William Friedman

argues that it is an obligation for women to lay teﬁllin, and one might imply from his

argument that this obligatory status applies to all mitzvos traditionally reserved for men.

Based on Friedman’s ruling, we might say that niddah is more than an opportunity for men,

it is an obligation.

Either way, whether we say niddah is an obligation or an opportunity for men, it is not an

uncomplicated process to invite cis men in particular into the practice. Women have been

an oppressed group for millenia and cis men have been their oppressors. Access to female

practice must be given in a way that honors the wounds, capacities, history, and lived

experience of women and in a way that centers the moral responsibility of cis men. But we

can honor these complications even as we take steps towards expanding equality and

honoring the female ancestral practice by opening niddah to cis men (and of course, trans

men as well).

This is not an entirely new idea. Gestures have been made to welcome cisgender and

non-menstruating men into the practice of niddah already. Within the Conservative

movement, Rabbi Joel Roth, for example, has long taught the spiritual value of heterosexual

men in relationship with menstruating women going to the mikvah when their partners do,

saying: I saw men’s mikvah observance as preparation of the soul for the resumption of marital

intimacy.

My claim is larger than this, though. I believe that if we truly honor the lineage of women,

we’d open this practice to people of all genders, in any or no style of relationship.

So how might a non-menstruating individual practice niddah? They might tie their practice

to a moment in the cycle of the moon—perhaps kiddush lavana, when She is at her fullest–

Heilman, Uriel. “More Men Making Monthly Mikvah Dunks as Menstrual RRte.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 13

Dec. 2015,

https://www.jta.org/2015/12/13/united-states/more-men-making-monthly-mikvah-dunks-as-menstrual-rite.

Accessed 12 Mar. 2023.

Friedman, Will. “Why Women Can - and Must - Lay Teﬁllin.” The Forward. The Forward, January 23, 2014.

https://forward.com/opinion/191430/why-women-can-and-must-lay-teﬁllin/.

as a nod to feminine roots of the practice of sacred sexuality and the moon as a feminine

symbol in our tradition.

A person could abstain from sexuality for one day, as per the biblical ordinance for men, or

for seven days, as per the biblical ordinance for women, or for some amount of time in

between these two, depending on their soul's needs and the demands of that particular

season of their life. They would immerse in the evening at the conclusion of their

abstinence to enter a state of tahara. All people would recite the blessing on mikvah and

perform the rite with the same sense of responsibility and obligation.

There are a number of blessed advantages to this idea. First, it would welcome trans

women into the practice of their mothers without unholy scrutiny into the particularities of

their anatomy.

Second, it would invite non-menstruating menopausal women to continue

this practice, continuing to tend to the body and honor the body throughout their lives.

Thirdly, if we introduced this practice to teenagers of all genders, it could become a

beautiful kevah, or structure, for a young person’s developing relationship with their own

sexuality.

If all people should be engaged in a niddah practice, there is an argument to be made that

we might reinstate the Biblical practice of a niddah style reaction to seminal emissions.

However, men abandoned their mitzvah while women maintained their practice. We can

honor the sacred eﬀorts and the suﬀering of our mothers by pinning our practice to the

cycle of the moon, no matter the nature of our own body’s ﬂow.

Sending all adults to the mikvah monthly to sanctify their sexuality, regardless of their

gender, may be a radical step, but one that is rooted in mesorah, the ancestral tradition,

and mitzvah, the Divine imperative of this moment now– the imperative of truth, the

imperative of justice, the imperative of sanctity.

To return to you, Plonyx, and the particularities of your query, I want to be clear: it isn’t fair

to ask a nonbinary person to be the vanguard in enacting this psak, this ruling, in what has

historically been such a gendered mitzvah. Cis men should be taking this plunge ﬁrst. But

you spoke of a longing for a practice of sacred sexuality, and I don’t want to ignore the

possibility that you might want to be the vanguard. Here is an open door. If it doesn’t

resonate with your soul, it is your spiritual prerogative to ﬁnd one that does. There are a

multitude of paths on which we can walk beside the Divine.

For further discussion on how trans women might navigate Nidda, see Rabbi Xava De Cordova’s teshuva,

Shyla: Are trans women obligated in niddah? How can that obligation be fulﬁlled?

See Chullin60b

But if this does resonate with your soul, come on in.

SACRED SEXUALITY

Plonyx, you said:

I want a practice of sacred sexuality that is rooted in Jewish ancestral wisdom and I’ve found my

niddah practice meaningful, but I am ambivalent about continuing a woman’s practice.

I’m appreciative of your desire for a practice of sacred sexuality and I think it’s worth

exploring whether niddah is in fact a practice of that kind.

What does sacred sexuality mean to you? What of the sacred are you looking for in the

experience of your own sexuality and in the act of sex? Before moving to some universal

elements of sacred sexuality, it might be wise to spend some time meditating on these

questions for yourself. Sanctity is universal and personal, both, and no one can deﬁne the

particularities of your personal longing for sanctity other than yourself.

When considering the universal shape of sacred sexuality, we might identify three major

elements of a sacred sexual practice:

(1) Kevah, container: Sacred sexuality has a deﬁned container. It is clear about the

boundaries of consent and the presence of desire within and between people. As it

is aﬃrmed within our sacred texts, Any sexual union without an abundance of passion,

love and will, is without the Divine Presence.

(2) Kavannah, intention: Sacred sexuality is intentional. Intentionality can range from

brief ﬂeeting intention to profound meditative intention. Sources abound for the

importance of kavannah within sacred sexuality in our tradition, including the

instruction from the Chemdas Yamim, a collection of Jewish customs published in the

1730s, that instructs the reader that as a person waits for their spouse to return

from the mikvah and join them in sexual union, they should set a spiritual kavannah

by chanting from Psalm 113, Hinei mah tov umah naim, how good and pleasant it is,

and instructions for men having sex in the missionary position from the mystical

giant, the RaMaQ, Rabbi Moshe Cordevero, that we might extend to all people: He

should direct his focus to the uniﬁcation of the eyes and the nose of each, and direct his

Chemdas Yamim Shabbos Kodesh Chp 9

Iggeret Hakodesh, 13th C.

These three elements emerge from core mystical principles developed by our ancestors and cherished within

Renewal Judaism

[rocking] movement to the mystery of the foundation/yesod that is collecting seed and

light from supernal hokhmah/wisdom.

(3) Mimalei kol olamim, non-duality: Sacred sexuality invites us into contact with

something larger than our mundane reality, and when we’re lucky, it allows the

material bounds of our bodies to melt as we encounter the Oneness that permeates

all reality. As we say daily in the Shema, our core incantation: the Divine is One!

Making contact with this oneness is central to all spiritual practice, as it says in

Proverbs, Know God in all your ways,

but it is particularly central to sacred physical

practices, as Rebbe Nachman of Breslav says: every spiritual thing that you learn, you

have to teach it also to your body.

Given these parameters, is niddah a practice of sacred sexuality?

In the Tanach, our most ancient of sacred texts, the evidence isn’t clear. There is no

instruction of kavannah, and no explicit language about sanctifying sexuality through these

practices.

In contrast, there are other mentions of more explicit sacred sexuality unconnected to

niddah that do appear in Tanach. One of the most direct, is the mention of the kadesha and

the kadesh, the female and male sex workers who are sacred.

The Torah acknowledges the existence of this role, but oﬀers conﬂicting evidence of how

our ancestors related to it. In one location, it says quite clearly says that no Jew should be a

kadesha or a kadesh,

but on the other hand, our sacred ancestor Tamar, matriarch of the

messianic line, disguised herself as a kadesha,

and Yehuda, the tribal leader from whom

we get out name “Yehudim” or Jews, had no problem hiring her for sex (although he might

have not know that she was an Isrealite kadesha), and from that liaison the ancestor of King

David was born and the messianic lineage (repetitively anchored to transgressive sexual

experiences) is seeded. We also know that our ancestors built rooms for kadeshim in the

holy temple, although King Josiah, violent mason of patriarchy, later tore them down.

Of particular interest to nonbinary Jews: in Mesopatamian societies that neighbored our

ancestors there is some evidence that the role of sacred sex worker might have been a

II King 23:7

Genesis 38:13-21

Deutoronomy 23:18

Likutei Maran 122:2.5.2

Proverbs 3:6

RaMaQ Or Yakar on Zohar 2:11b

genderqueer role, and it is possible that the kadesh and kadesha were similarly

genderqueer. Rabbi Irwin Keller points out that the tanna, Onkelos, a second century sage,

translates the injunction against the kadesha and kadesh into Aramaic as:

No Israelite woman should become a servingman and no Israelite man should become a

maidservant.

In [Onkelos’] understanding, Rabbi Keller states, the crime is not about sexuality or idolatry, but

speciﬁcally about gender.

Reﬂecting on the kadesh/a, Rabbi Keller says:

Torah and its associated commentary treat k’deshim as if they are somehow foreign,

practitioners of some other nation’s religion. As if no such people would naturally arise

within Israel. But this is clearly not true; no prohibitions on cross-dressing, no prohibition

on Israelite men become k’deshim would be necessary if it were not in fact happening

organically.

I look across the ages and I see my people. The k’deshim, these eﬀeminati–who knows

how they would label themselves– transgender? gender-ﬂuid? nonbinary?-- if they’d been

born 3000 years later? Who knows how I would have labeled myself if I’d been born just

40 years later?

But I see them…I admire their courage, insistently leading the workshop of Asherah,

serving the Divine Feminine, in a moment when the rulers were insisting that God could

only be male, and so also His priests. And I cry with them, as they see the Divine being

narrowed down by narrow minds…

This history might oﬀer wisdom for our own practices of sacred sexuality. What might it

mean to revive a practice inspired by the kadesh and kadesha?

But these references aside, the most robust record of something like sacred sexuality is the

Tanach, our ﬁrst sacred texts, is within the famous Song of Songs, a sensual poetic

conversation between lovers written about three thousand years ago. The Song of Songs is

a foundational text for the Jewish mystical tradition, each verse a doorway to a sprawling

castle of meaning, but just on the pshat, or literal level, there are a couple of directives

within Song of Songs that we might consider ancient instructions for sacred sexual practice

including:

Keller, Irwin. “A Postcard from the Eﬀeminati.” Essay. In Liberating Gender for Jews and Allies: The Wisdom of

Transkeit, edited by Jane Rachel Litman and Jakob Hero-Shaw. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars

Publishing, 2022.

ור

ועְתּ־ם

ורי

עָתּ־ם

ה־ת

אד

עץָפּ

חֶתּ

Do not wake or rouse love until it please!

This imperative might inspire a sacred practice of paying careful attention to the desire in

our lover.

And then we have:

ול

םי

ות

ור

׃םי

Eat, lovers, and drink: Drink deep of love!

For those of us who ﬁnd sensuality a path to the Divine, this command could be a lodestar.

The mystics understood even the less direct verses in the Song of Songs as a literal sexual

guidebook, a kind of Jewish Kama Sutra.

The RaMaQ used the Song of Songs verse His left hand was under my head, His right arm did

embrace me

as explicated in the Zohar to explain a sexual choreography that could

channel appropriate seﬁrot, or Divine attributes, through the body with the kiss of mouths

and genitals as a formation of the Divine name in ﬂesh.

The instructions then proceed to

outline a sacred number of kisses and a body meditation to undertake in the sexual act in

order to bring the male and female Divine attributes into sacred union on the spirit plane.

Zoharic scholar Danni Matt notes that the practice, in its full detail, is a counterpart to the

Tantric practice of maithuna, in which a couple understands themselves as embodying

Divine archetypes within the act of sex.

I love each of these sources, but I still ﬁnd myself longing for a more explicit link in our

sacred texts between niddah and sacred sexuality, one that I can’t seem to ﬁnd. Maybe that

vacuum is simply an invitation for us to channel our own Torah in the poetic chasidic style.

Here’s one idea: Proverbs 25:17 says: “Visit your “raiacha”’s house sparingly, lest they

become over-sated with you and despise you.” Raiacha is normally translated as neighbor,

but Song of Songs 5:16 seems to deﬁne raiacha as a synonym of lover. Perhaps Proverbs is

teaching us that our beloveds, those we join with in long-term intimate relationship, are the

bechina, or associative-spiritual-hyperlink, of raiacha, our closest neighbors, so let us make

Reb Moshe Cordovero on Zohar 2:11b

Shir HaShirim 2:6

Shir HaShirim 5:1

Shir HaShirim 2:7, 3:5

pauses in our visits, moderating supply to build up demand. A practice of niddah can allow

us to introduce these pauses, a kevah, a container, and a kavannah, an intention, with the

purpose of Mimalei kol olamim, achieving a love so powerful it might bring about a state of

non-dual consciousness.

I feel conﬁdent that more aﬃrmation of the sacred possibilities of niddah can be found in

the poetics of our sacred texts, the Tanach, as we say:

ההּ

ו,הּ

בא

דהּ

Turn [the Torah] and turn it, for all is within it.

You may have noticed that I looked to the scant relevant verses in the Tanach, our ﬁrst

layer of sacred texts, in my attempts to shore up the possibility of niddah as a practice of

sacred sexuality, but I haven’t surveyed the chapters and chapters of texts on niddah in the

rabbinic texts and the codes of Jewish law from the past fourteen hundred years.

I don’t think there’s much evidence for niddah as a practice of sacred sexuality in rabbinic

texts. There might be some slivers of sanctity in those pages, but texts written by men

about men arguing about the details of women’s menstrual ﬂows and the color of their

menstrual blood and the nature of the women’s impurity—texts about men making very

consequential decisions about women’s bodies—aren’t inherently sacred.

How can they be sacred when the kevah is violated—women and those who menstruate

are not included in the conversation, the boundaries of their consent and desires ﬁltered

through the curational eye of male rabbis? And how can they be sacred if kavanah is

violated—women’s intentions not a part of the process for developing the bounds of the

practice, sometimes violently suppressed, as with the Egyptian women under Maimonides

ruling?

The Shulchan Aruch demands that those who menstruate conduct what is politely

translated as an “internal examination” stuﬃng a wadded white cloth into their vaginal

cavity to the depth that a penis reaches a bare minimum of twice after every menstrual

cycle– even if the women so instructed protest that they ﬁnd it “uncomfortable.”

Perhaps

there is sanctity in this practice for those who enjoy it and ﬁnd sanctity in it, doing what

their mothers did, doing what the male rabbis said was God’s will, but I won’t aﬃrm that

there is sanctity in a practice that at its face value insists on a regular sexual assault that

must be performed by its victim on pain of (a false message of) enraging God and their

spouses.

Yoreh Deah 196:6

Pirkei Avos 5:22

How can there be inherent sanctity in this practice when Mimalei kol olamim is violated and

the inherent dignity of all people that arises from our Oneness trampled on?

We can put this misogyny in context: in some cases, our male rabbinic ancestors were

actually far ahead of their non-Jewish contemporaries when it came to the respect they

accorded women. But not always. When we consider what sources to draw on in the

present day, the line is clear. Al kol panim, at any rate, men talking about women’s bodies

and making decisions on their behalf is structurally misogynistic. Misogyny is not sacred. I

can reclaim the potential of niddah as our Biblical ancestors may have meant it while

rejecting the practice of niddah as deﬁned by our rabbinic ancestors.

This has gone too far! I can hear some people crying. How dare you dismiss a whole

category of our ancestors’ wisdom just like that? What will be next?! We’ll have nothing left!

This is sacrilege!

Ah. But the thing is, we’ve already done this. And done it wisely, without losing contact with

the ancestors. When I say we’ve already done this, I mean men. Our male ancestors.

Without outcry. See, alongside pages and pages of discussion about the laws of niddah, the

talmud also contains pages and pages of discussion about the laws of medical care.

For what purpose do people eat [hyssop]? It is eaten for curing intestinal worms. And

with what is it eaten? It is eaten with seven black dates...

One who was bitten by a snake should have the fetus of a white donkey brought to him,

and it should be torn open and placed on the snakebite...

Urine that is forty days old is an eﬀective remedy for several maladies: A very small

cupful is beneﬁcial in treating a hornet sting….

We do not consider these imperatives sacred. Maybe archaeologically sacred or historically

sacred, but not sacred as medicine. Shinnui HaIttim, we say, invoking a maxim that allows us

to wholesale curate ancestral wisdom. Times change.

Does rejecting our ancestors’ medical imperatives mean that all of Judaism has crumbled?

No. We have disregarded many of the particulars of our ancestral advice around how to

evaluate, treat, and heal sick people, but we can still draw on the general values of our

tradition to maintain a rich spiritual practice of caring for sick that is mamash, truly, rooted

in ancestral wisdom.

Ibid

Shabbat 109b

Let us award women and those who menstruate the same dignity.

A guiding truth, from sibling Leslie Feinberg:

History, in the hands of those who have the most to gain from change, is a formidable

weapon. That's why colonizers and imperialists always burned and destroyed the

historical accounts of those they conquered. They revise history to parrot one message

over and over again, "the way things are now is the way they've always been". The

meaning is clear and demoralizing: Don't even think about ﬁghting for change.

When we understand the history of how Jewish imperatives and traditions have developed,

we are empowered.

As it is, I’m not the ﬁrst person to object to the sexual attitudes of our rabbinic ancestors.

Having heard the story of Maimonides and the holy women of Egypt, it might not surprise

you to know that Maimonides, who was foundational in the formation of rabbinic law, was

a committed Aristotilian and deeply sex negative. A 16th century anonymously authored

sex positive sacred text titled the Iggeret HaKodesh angrily declares:

The matter is not as Rabbi Moses [Maimonides] of blessed memory thought and believed

in his Guide to the Perplexed, when he praised Aristotle’s statements.… We, who possess

the holy Torah, believe that the blessed God created everything as His wisdom decreed

and created nothing shameful or ugly. For if we say that copulation is shameful, then the

sexual organs are contemptible. But God, blessed be He, created them according to His

word!

Thankfully, today there are a number of teachers rooted in Jewish ancestral wisdom who

are reviving practices of sexual sanctity that are not rooted in the misogyny and

unpleasantness of many of our rabbinic ancestors.

The holy Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, zt”l, and his wife, Eve Ilsen, oﬀer the following

direction:

In the sexual act, we want to escape the sense of being imprisoned by skin and separated

from the rest of the universe. Often, however, this desire remains quite unconscious, and

then sex is engaged in as a mere diversion from the concerns and stresses of daily life.

Our contact is only skin deep, and consequently we continue to feel alone, abandoned,

betrayed, and unloved.

As translated here https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/iggeret-ha-kodesh

Feinberg, Leslie. “Learning From Experience.” Essay. In Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, 119. Boston,

Mass: Beacon Press, 2007.

But sexual love can be a hidden window onto the spiritual reality. At the height of

passion or in the fullness of love, we might suddenly feel transported to a diﬀerent plane

of existence where all of our sensations, experiences, and thoughts occur against the

peaceful backdrop of an overriding sense of at- oneness.

Love is so universal in the world that it even underlies the physical forces of nature. What

is gravity but the loving force of attraction between two bodies in space? How marvelous,

how basic love is in the universe!

The ecological spirituality called for today is founded in a deep recognition of the unity of

life – a unity that is celebrated in the act of love. Through erotic passion we overcome our

habitual egoistic insularity and reach into the core of other beings.

In another essay, Eve addresses her experience more explicitly:

I do experience sex (even such safe sex) as risky business. It is precisely and only him that

I want there, within me, embracing me. I mean, I could get capitulated far out into the

Great Wow, and maybe never come back! Then when my scattered cells/selves do

re-collect, they are interspersed with particles of him. Thank God it is him, because I am

no longer quite who I was; post coitus, I am a mutant. Surely this is one of the Sacred

Paths. Hidden in such an irresistible drive is a Way Home. In my head I know that we are

never really separate from God. When we make love, the reality of what this may mean

begins to unfold in my ﬂesh.

It might seem a bit awkward to peek like this into the bedroom of one of our people’s

holiest sages, but learning about sacred sexuality directly from our teachers is a Jewish

tradition. There is a famous passage in the Talmud

in which Rav Kahana hides under the

bed of his teacher, the sage Rav.

He heard Rav chatting and laughing with his wife, and seeing to his needs. Rav Kahana

said to Rav: The mouth of Abba, Rav, is like one whom has never eaten a cooked dish, i.e.,

his behavior was lustful. Rav said to him: Kahana, you are here? Leave, as this is an

undesirable mode of behavior.

Rav Kahana said to him: It is Torah, and I must learn.

It is Torah. We must learn.

Having taken you on a very meandering tour of some of our sources on sacred sexuality, I

hope these ins and outs might empower you as you make your own choices about your

Brachot 62a

Schachter-Shalomi, Zalman, and Eve Ilsen. “Sacred Sex.” YES! Magazine, October 20, 1997.

practice that best enhance your relationship with the Divine within you, around you, and

beyond you.

I believe in the legitimacy and power of a personal path balanced between ancestral

tradition and the Divine imperative of the now, but I also believe in the legitimacy and

power of a communal path aiming at the same balance.

To that end, I will oﬀer a psak that represents my best sense of the mitzvah, the Divinely

sanctioned imperative, in the realm of sacred sexuality today.

Psak

From my keyhole, my aniyut daati, there is a Jewish imperative for sexually active folks to

invite into their lives a practice of sacred sexuality, no matter their gender. A practice of

sacred sexuality is one in which we bring into our sexuality intentionality, presence, and

honoring of the self, the other (if there is another or others), and the Divine which is within

us, around us, and beyond us.

To enhance this practice, ancestral wisdom commends a monthly practice of a period of

one to seven days of sexual abstinence, followed by a mikvah. This monthly practice can be

ﬁxed to a menstrual ﬂow, or absent that, a period in the cycle of the moon. One might also

ﬁnd a teacher to delve into the lesser known mystical sacred sexuality practices of our

ancestors to enhance one’s practice.

In order for it to be a kosher or complete immersion, the mikvah must be kosher: it must

honor the inherent dignity of a body of any gender.

What do to if one does not have access to a kosher mikvah? A psak on mikvah follows.

Mikvah: A Psak

I hope that one day soon we’ll live in a world where every neighborhood with Jews will have

a kosher mikvah in which folks of all genders can immerse.

We are not there yet. Whether we’re talking about constructed mikvaot or natural bodies of

water functioning as mikvaot, not all neighborhoods have mikvaot, and not all mikvaot have

non-gendered options, not all mikvaot are accessible for all bodies, and overburdened

caregivers or other folks with many responsibilities in an atomic society might be unable to

create time to access a mikvah, even if there was a kosher mikvah available.

What to do?

There is a traditional path: the tradition says the men who are required to immerse in the

mikvah may instead pour nine kav of water over their bodies

—about the amount of water

in a four minute shower.

To anyone concerned with the fact that traditional sources

excluded menstruating women from availing themselves of this option (which was, in fact,

the option the aforementioned Egyptian women were bravely campaigning for), we might

oﬀer the Yiddish expression: סרעייאזיאוק,ידיבר – Rabbi, the cow is yours– which is a kind of

gesture towards a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” – if the matter considered your own welfare

you would (or in this case, did) rule diﬀerently. We must aﬀord others the same

consideration we permit ourselves.

Still, for me and perhaps for others, there’s something a little unsettled about this option on

its own. Most of us shower every day. Is there enough power in a simple shower? Is it

kadesh or set aside enough to wake us up, to plug us in to the spiritual power of our action,

to summon the kavanna, the kevah, the Mimalei kol olamim we’re looking for in our sacred

sexual practice?

I suspect not. I don’t think a monthly shower will do the job we’re asking of it.

Enter: the mikvah bowl.

A mikvah bowl is a bowl set aside only for the purpose of mikvah. One might enact this

setting aside, this sanctiﬁcation, by immersing the chosen bowl in a body of natural water,

through ritual, or through blessing.

12.5 liters or 3.3 gallons according to R’ Chaim No’eh or 21.5 liters or 5.7 gallons according to the Chazon Ish.

“Choshen Mishpat", Kollel. “Shower for 9 Kabin.” Din Online. Kollel “Choshen Mishpat” , March 16, 2014.

https://dinonline.org/2014/03/16/shower-for-9-kabin/

Brachot 22a:16

When it is time to immerse in mikvah, a person undressed in a shower or bath ﬁlls the

sacred mikvah bowl with water, makes the appropriate blessing(s), and pours it over their

body three times in sequence, pronouncing each time: kosher, kosher, kosher, or for those

who prefer a diﬀerent blessing, perhaps: tahor, tahor, tahor.

The word kosher or tahor is an aﬃrmation of the body’s inherent wholeness, rightness, and

purity in whatever ﬂawed or limited form it takes.

If a person is in an active sexual relationship, their kavannah or intention might include

remembering the Godliness they embody on their own, in their corporeality and their own

sexuality, whole and complete, before they give themselves in union with another.

There is much to seek in the act of sex, many ways to open oneself to hunger for something

beyond the self, so there is power in pausing to periodically sanctify that pursuit by rooting

ourselves ﬁrst in an aﬃrmation of our body’s perfection as it is, a sacred God-made vessel

of life.

We might perform hiddur mitzvah, or an enhancement of the mitzvah, by collecting ocean

water in a bottle and adding a few drops of the ocean water to the water in our mikvah bowl

before pouring it over the body, an echo of the “kiss” of rain water and the pool waters that

is part of a traditional mikvah.

A bowl is a pragmatic solution, but also a spiritually resonant one. A bowl is an important

symbol of sacred sexuality in Judaism. In Song of Songs, the lover sings out:

Your navel is like a round bowl!

This bowl and the mikvah bowl also echo with the bowl in a parallel text: Exodus. There we

are told that Betzalel, the master artist:

[M]ade the washing bowl of copper and a stand of copper from the mirrors of the women

who performed tasks at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting.

The medieval commentator Rashi explains that when Moshe asked the people for

contributions to build the Sacred Tent, the women oﬀered up their precious copper mirrors.

Moshe was oﬀended. What use did he have of these objects of female vanity? But the Holy

One Blessed be She said to him:

Accept them; these are dearer to Me than all the other contributions, because through

them the women reared those huge hosts in Egypt!

Exodus 38:8

Song of Songs 7:3

The story goes that when the people were slaves in Egypt, the men would be too tired to

have sex. The women would bring them food and take out their mirrors, in a little

katoptronophiliac

play, and ﬂirt with their husbands in the mirror, arousing their desire,

leading to sex, which led to many children. It was from these mirrors that Betzelal made the

washing bowl through which people puriﬁed their bodies at the Sacred Tent.

We have so little evidence of the wisdom and sacred practices of our mothers, it’s mamesh,

really, a powerful thing to reclaim the bowl as sacred sexual object in their names.

The mikvah bowl is a novel idea that emerged from my own meditations. I rarely have

access to a safe mikvah, which frustrates me. Sacred sexuality is central to my spiritual

practice, I wanted some way to incorporate our ancestral tradition of bodily immersion. I

could not believe that the Divine did not share that desire.

As I meditated and contemplated in prayer and in the inky words of our sacred texts and

the “words” of white parchment that surround each word of ink and whisper their own lost

secrets of our ancient mothers and trans ancestors, the concept of the mikvah bowl came

to me, framed in the texts I’ve shared above. I saw it in conversation with the other powerful

domestic ritual objects of our faith: the challah cover, the bisamim box, the seder plate. I

immediately selected a special bowl, consecrated with sacred words, and began using it as

part of my personal practice. Immersing in a communal mikvah or a natural body of water

has its own unique intensity, and having another person declare me kosher, its own

sweetness, but there is something special about being the one, with the full power of my

own neshama, my own Divine spark, to remind all the parts of myself that I, in my full

physicality so regularly and mundaley tended to in the very bathroom I am standing in, am,

in that full “mundane” physicality, kosher.

May the blessing of the Divine shine on you on the path you choose to walk.

Katoptronophilia: Arousal by engaging in sexual activity in front of mirrors

Appendix: Tamei, Tahor

Much of the existing halachic discourse on niddah utilizes the terms tahor and tamei. What

do these words actually mean?

The King James Bible renders tamei as “unclean.” At ﬁrst blush, this is an uncomfortable

translation. We have such an overwhelming history of misogyny built around the notion that

menstruating women are “unclean” (often grounded in this very text), it feels ugly. But

perhaps unclean is better than the oft-used “impure,” in that unclean gestures towards

hygiene and the medical. Remember: in the original text men are tamei as well as women

and healthy emissions and unhealthy emissions are all considered tamei. And remember,

there is no separate health code in the Torah and the Torah does not consider any element

of life as outside its jurisdiction. Read at face value, this section of code is one that aims to

address anxieties around illness and health, and it contains some blend of medical advice

and spiritual advice. Or perhaps it is entirely medical advice. We do have a fair amount of

medical advice in the Torah and subsequent books (almost all of which we disregard).

For those who wish to view tamei as a spiritual condition or those who don’t see a binary

between the medical and the spiritual, there are other ways to translate the word and its

opposite, tahara.

Rabbi Irwin Keller suggests we might explain tahara as "spiritually available" or "a clear

channel" with the opposite state, tamei, translated as "clouded" or "in the mix" or "in the

thick of it.

Rabbi Phyllis Ocean Berman oﬀers another powerful take:

[I]n considering those moments in life when we are completely consumed by something --

a new baby, a new love-making, a new creative development, sickness, death -- we

naturally separate ourselves from the community. Then we can concentrate on that which

demands our complete attention. We are "tamei" during a time of intense concentration

on one aspect of our lives and separation from the other aspects.

At other times, we are able to focus on multiple concerns, balancing them all with relative

ease. Then we are "tahor", able to hold multiple identities and tasks in and beyond our

home and work lives.

Both "tamei" -- that intense laser beam of concentration -- and "tahor" -- that balance

that enables us to be in and out of community ﬂuidly as appropriate -- are holy ways of

Keller, Irwin. “Not Torah, Not Time, Not Community.” Irwin Keller, May 13, 2022.

https://www.irwinkeller.com/itzikswell/2022/5/13/not-torah-not-time-not-community

being at dif erent times of our life. I believe these are the real meanings of these two

terms that have been

so poorly translated, with so much damage in particular to women, for so many

hundreds of years.

It might be valuable to pause and spend some time getting clear for yourself how you

understand tahor and tamei. What understanding of these concepts could help you foster a

practice of sacred sexuality?

Acknowledgements

I thank the leadership of the Trans Halakha Project’s Teshuva Writing Collective for their

bold vision and I am grateful for the ﬁnancial, intellectual, and spiritual support oﬀered by

the Collective that enabled the development of this teshuva. I am also grateful for the

companionship and inspiration from my fellow scholars within the Collective.

I thank my teacher, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi zt”l, for his powerful vision of Integral

Halacha and Renewal Judaism. Although I never met Reb Zalman in person, my work is

profoundly shaped by his, and I am indebted to him for the path he modeled for so many of

us.

I thank my friend Rabbi Jane Rachel Litman for their feedback and assistance, for their

support, and for their pioneering work.

I thank Rabbi David Siﬀ for his teachings on the workings of halacha and the potential of

Integral Halacha.

I thank Rabbi Sara Leya for her teachings on the architecture of teshuva and the joys of

halacha.

I thank all of my holy colleagues and friends and teachers in the AOP for creating a potent

environment of Torah where I could explore many of these ideas. You are a miracle. I am

grateful for you.

I thank my chavrusa and life partner Ash Blum for his wisdom and his brilliance and his

support in developing this teshuva. Any true Torah I oﬀer the world comes through the

portal of our joint soul.

I thank God for Her love. Ain od milvada.

Berman, Phyllis. “Torah of ‘Tamei’: Laser-Beam Holiness, Not ‘Impurity.’” Reb Zalman's 75th Birthday Shabbaton.

Speech presented at the Reb Zalman's 75th birthday Shabbaton, 2000.

וצ

ר־ת

איִתּ

ות

ב׃י

To do what pleases You, my Goddess, is my desire and Your Torah is in my innards

Tehillim 40:9