Forsaken: The Menstruant in Medieval Jewish Mysticism

Introduction

1 Introduction Forsaken: “Niddah—de-Naddad lah El” zohar 3:226a (rm) In the world of the Zohar, menstruation is antithetical to God. The biblical term for menstruant, niddah, has two possible roots, n-d-h and n-d-d, both of which imply expelling.1 Perhaps menstruants were temporarily cast out of their communities; alternatively, the term may suggest, even more neutrally, the flow of blood from a menstruant’s body.2 Many medieval Jewish mystics, however, saw menstruation differently. According to a section of the Zohar, the most popular work of medieval Kabbalah, the menstruant’s title of niddah tells us that “God flees from her.” God abandons menstruants because God cannot suffer impurity. The niddah repels the forces of the holy, and her spiritual vacuum is immediately filled by the forces of evil and impurity. The niddah appears with stunning frequency in the Zohar.3 To be sure, menstrual laws appear prominently in medieval law codes and responsa literature as well. But the Zohar is not a legal work, and the focus on menstruation that emerged from the Zohar was different in kind from constraints in other religious circles, in part because it was not merely a set of laws or customs .4 Like all other Jewish traditions grounded in biblical text, Jewish mystics reinterpreted the laws of the Temple cult in ways that enabled them to continue to have access to the divine in a post-Temple world.5 The cultic restrictions on impurity were expressed anew in Kabbalah as a protection of the purity of the celestial Temple, one no longer confined by spatial boundaries. Breaching those restrictions allowed impurity to invade the holy realm. For many medieval kabbalists, therefore, the menstruant’s spiritual vacuum leads her to a demonic state, and a menstruating woman is often portrayed as the embodiment of the sitra ah . ra, the demonic other side. As such, she is not only dangerous but also forever to be excluded from the divine. 2 · Introduction Indeed, of the three major religions in medieval Europe—Judaism, Christianity , and Islam—only Judaism cannot boast a single female mystic. Medieval Jewish women’s exclusion from mystical pursuits cannot be ascribed simply to patriarchy or to fear of women’s sexuality: Christian and Muslim women faced the same obstacles yet were able to express themselves within the mystical tradition. This glaring absence has been noted by several scholars of medieval Jewish history and mysticism who offer varying explanations. Gershom Scholem attributes women’s absence to the association between women and the demonic in Jewish myth.6 Judith Baskin argues that Kabbalah is a highly intellectual enterprise, and medieval Jewish women never would have been able to attain the requisite knowledge to participate in mystical endeavors .7 Medieval kabbalists, however, offered their own rationale. In the medieval mystical texts beginning with Hekhalot literature (that is, early Jewish mystical literature) through pre-expulsion Kabbalah, women were not passively absent, but rather actively barred from mystical pursuits. Late-antique and medieval Jewish mystics were unique in their understanding of physical impurity as an insurmountable obstacle to divine communion. Even had a woman the education necessary to comprehend a Zoharic text, she would have been denied access to the divine realm because of her innate impurity. This presumed antagonism between the menstruant and the divine appeared in mystical praxis and contributed to the rise of a kabbalistic myth in which, just as the human menstruant was separated from man, the divine menstruant had to be separated from the holy aspects of God. Any contact between the pure male sefirot and the impure Shekhinah could infect the Godhead with the forces of the demonic realm. Menstruation became a nefarious force capable of polluting the divine realm. This symbolic understanding of the menstruant barred Jewish women from “normative” medieval Jewish mysticism—significantly impacting their spiritual status. “normative” jewish mysticism Modern studies of the psychology of mysticism have shown that women are more prone to mystical, or paranormal, religious experiences than are men.8 It is therefore likely that mystical experience was not unknown to medieval Jewish women. Yet it is also likely that this form of spirituality was not acceptable among acknowledged Jewish mystics: it did not “count” as mysticism Introduction · 3 among the male intellectual elite. Michel Foucault has argued that no knowledge exists outside the confines of a cultural context; to maintain power, the authority of a given...