12/10/06

Doctor challenges Jewish menstrual taboos

It's rare to see this happen. An Orthodox medical doctor has raised a question that challenges age-old Jewish menstrual taboos. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz explains the details:

"The article was not intended to challenge halakha, nor to create a new version of Judaism, like Karaism or Reform. My article was intended to indicate a distortion that has been created as a result of a custom that over a long period has become a law. The humra of Jewish women having to count seven clean days for niddah, and not just for ziva as prescribed in the Torah, was accepted from earliest times as a law from which there is no deviation. Today we know that this ruling produces a problem of halakhic infertility in many women. Within this situation is a failure of internal logic: It is unreasonable that a ruling that derives from a humra of Jewish women will produce a conflict with the first commandment in the Torah - to be fruitful and multiply.

2 comments:

Steg (dos iz nit der šteg) said...

very interesting!

Anonymous said...

Maybe they can find some reason to let me eat peanuts on Pesach and meat during the 9 Days? Oh and what about the two days of Yom Tov, according to S. Stern the whole thing is based on a mistake.