samet@sfmag.UUCP (A.I.Samet) (06/23/85)
> > A niddah ( Jewish woman who requires mikveh immersion to become > > permissible) [A. Samet] > You seem to be unnecessarily obscure yourself here, considering that > there may be people reading this group who don't know Jewish law. > I think these two lines might more properly be written: > > A woman having her period, or one who has had her period in the past > > and not gone through the required rituals of purification afterwards. [Isaac Dimitrovsky] A detailed definition of a niddah would require careful and lengthy wording to avoid misconceptions. This would have distracted attention from the main subject. Your definition carries incorrect implications, and illustrates the difficulty in being terse and thoroughly accurate: 1) A woman can become a niddah without having a period, e.g., as a result of giving birth, non-menstrual staining, or medical examination which opens the cervix. 2) Not only woman are niddahs. As I recall, a female child is presumed to be a niddah because of certain hormonal phenomena which occur at birth. 3) The terms purification and impure, are very loose translations of "tahara" and "tumah". They carry connotations of uncleanliness, which are misleading and insulting. Y. Samet