As one of Washington DC’s highest-profile orthodox rabbis is released early from a six-year prison term (coronavirus), here’s a quick revisit of Rabbi Freundel’s 52 counts of sexual perversion against orthodox women in the ritual bath (scroll down). And here’s a look at the larger place of the ritual bath in female orthodox Jewish life, and in our current pandemic.
[B]eginning on the days when she anticipates her period, a husband and wife are forbidden from having any sexual relations until seven days following the end of her period. Considering orthodox law states that a period’s duration is a minimum of five days, this typically spans about two weeks or longer, depending on whether her post-menstrual discharge cooperates. In short, this means that for about half of every month, all aspects of an orthodox woman’s life, relationship, sexuality, and emotional health, are dictated by her vaginal discharge…
While the woman is required to count seven clean days before she may immerse herself in a ritual bath (mikvah) prior to reuniting with her husband, it’s not only a matter of days or time waiting. The woman must take an active role to ensure she is “clean” by wearing only white underwear and conducting self-examinations of her vaginal canal with special white cloths twice a day, every day, before sundown. The white cloth is inserted into the vagina so that any fluid or discharge is absorbed. The first examination of the seven days requires the cloth to be left in for about an hour, even if the woman is out of the house, and it is usually quite painful…
If during the seven days any of the examination cloths contain even a tiny spot darker than tan, or a spot on her underwear bigger than a penny and darker than tan, she must take the underwear or cloth to a special rabbi for further evaluation. This Rabbi will then examine the color to determine if it is light enough for her to keep counting, or if it’s too dark or too red tinted such that she must begin counting the seven clean days over, even if it is day 7.
Okay then! Now – what about the bath and the epidemic?
Well, even with all that rabbi-sniffing, the orthodox woman still can’t do the deed until she goes to the ritual bath: “[W]omen must visit the mikvah.” That’s must, babe.
(Does it get even kinkier than this? Don’t ask.)
But things like common baths are notoriously germy (the subject is an excellent vector through which to clarify the meaning of irony), and you desperately want to stay away from them at a time like this. “[W]omen are understandably petrified of going to mikvah: In order for the immersion to count as valid, you must immerse your entire naked body, so that the water touches you completely. One of the main ways of transmission of coronavirus is by touching surfaces that have the disease – and some people may have coronavirus and be asymptomatic, in which case they might show up to mikvah.” But… you MUST use them!
“There are a lot of fixtures of Jewish life that Jews can actually live without,” Rivkah Slonim, a Hasidic woman who has written and lectured extensively about mikvah use, told me. “We can be without synagogues. We can be without a Torah scroll. We cannot, in Jewish law, move forward as a community … without a mikvah.” Immersion is a commandment that comes directly from the Torah, and the punishment for violating it—being cut off from God—is severe...
Although people outside of the Orthodox community might say that these women should just stay home, going to the mikvah is not optional in the way that praying together in synagogue or attending family gatherings is, according to Ruth Balinsky Friedman, a clergywoman at Ohev Shalom, an Orthodox synagogue in Washington, D.C. “I very much understand the impulse to see religion as more symbolic—something that we do when we’re able to, but in a time of crisis, we put aside,” she told me. But “you can’t cancel” the commandments governing sex, she said. “That’s the word of God.”
So you go, girl! Get in there, get infected, pass it on to the old folks and the young. None of this symbolic shit when it comes to the sexual filth of women. That’s the word of God.
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Useful background on the ultraorthodox mind:
[They] follow literally the biblical model in which God controls and does everything in history. They firmly believe that as long as humans please God by doing mitzvot, God will defeat their enemies and grant them victory… [Many of their leaders] dismissed medical considerations because God controls every detail of history…
In the coronavirus case, this policy – which totally fails in reality − was applied to the community. The consequences are devastating… [T]he virus [, some of their leaders told them,] is a punishment for lashon hara (harmful gossip speech); people should stop and repent, and the plague would stop…
Some Haredim allowed themselves to be exposed to the coronavirus because God would protect them. Many Evangelicals around the world have done the same. Given the natural laws and medical evidence of a pandemic, this behavior is nothing but magical thinking. Magic claims that through certain words or actions − in this case, religious faith/behaviors − God is “compelled” to do what the practitioner wants.
… The sad outcome of a lack of secular education is that people more easily slip into pre-modern, magical thinking. The Haredi penalty for grasping at magic is greater contagion… [T]he average Haredi Jew lacks understanding of the serious threat of the coronavirus and the urgency of taking preventive actions.
Unfortunately, the Gedolim − the Torah greats − who make the rulings that guide [haredi] behavior are just as uninformed as their followers. This explains their delayed and initially counterproductive responses to the threat. The community has paid a terrible price for its leadership’s ignorance of science and secular knowledge.. . [D]eprived of essential knowledge, mired in poverty [the haredim are now uniquely] vulnerable to disease.