My Daughter, You Are Powerful

Tumah, Time, and the Hidden Work of Becoming

In memory of our holy soldiers who fell sanctifying God’s Name and the Land of Israel:

Ephraim son of Liat and Shmuel, Yosef Malachi son of Dina and David, Eliyahu Moshe Shlomo son of Sarah and Shimon, Yosef Chaim son of Rachel and Eliyahu, Netanel son of Revital and Elad, Yakir son of Chaya and Yehoshua, Ran, son of Sara and Kenny.

A girl becomes a woman

My daughter, there is a moment in your life that can go one of two ways.

You get your first period. Someone in your life—a mother, a teacher, a friend, or a precious aunt Sara Leah Z'L, in my case—either helps you understand what just happened or doesn't. Either you are given a language that dignifies this moment, or you absorb it from the culture around you.

The culture around you does not do a particularly good job of conveying this.

At best, you are told, "This is natural, this is normal, welcome to womanhood." At worst, you are handed a set of laws that feel like restrictions, a word, "tumah," that sounds like an accusation, and a ritual, "mikveh," that feels like you need to be cleaned of something.

Our girls almost never receive the truth: what just happened in her body is one of the most significant things that will ever happen to her. And the tradition that surrounds it is one of the most sophisticated and honoring frameworks for female power that exists anywhere.

That is what I want to explore today.

The word we need to reclaim

Parshat Tazria opens with a woman who has just given birth. And immediately the Torah uses the word tumah.

We need to understand what this word actually holds. If we get this wrong, everything that follows will also go wrong.

Our tradition teaches: ein tumah ela b'davar she'yesh bo kedushah. Tumah only rests on something that has the capacity for holiness. It rests on something other than stones and trivial matters. It rests on vessels, on what carries potential, on things capable of kedushah, holiness.

Before we say another word about tumah, we have already said something profound about the woman who carries it. She is a vessel. She carries powerful potential. She is capable of kedushah at the highest level. The tumah is a form of recognition.

What does tumah actually mark? It appears in the Torah at thresholds—at death, where a soul departs; at birth, where a soul arrives; and at the body’s most generative passages, where ordinary life and the source of life itself grow thin.

It reflects proximity to that boundary.

The vessel carries the trace of having been close to the place where God works.

A woman at the threshold of birth or of her monthly cycle has stood at that boundary. Her body touched the space between potential and life, between existence and non-existence. The tumah that follows marks that encounter.

She counts.

Here is what I find most radical about the laws of niddah.

She does not simply wait to become tahor; she counts.

Seven clean days, deliberately and intentionally. She watches her body, marks the days, and moves through them with awareness. She arrives at the mikveh having counted her own way there.

Have you ever noticed what else in Judaism we count with this kind of intention?

We are in the middle of sefirat ha'omer right now. Forty-nine days. Seven weeks of seven. The Zohar teaches that these seven weeks correspond to the seven lower sefirot—chesed, gevurah, tiferet, netzach, hod, yesod, and malchut—the seven fundamental attributes through which God's presence flows into the world. Each week we work on one attribute. Each day during that week, a combination is made. We are building ourselves into people capable of receiving Torah. The counting is the work.

The woman's seven nekiyim are the same movement, structurally and spiritually.

Seven days, counted deliberately, one by one. She is building herself, day by day, back into her full power. 

Both countings end in a covenantal encounter. Shavuot ends at Sinai, where Israel stands before God and receives the Torah. The woman's counting ends at the mikveh — at the threshold where she reclaims her full standing as a partner in creation.

Both countings treat time as sacred, moving with intention toward transformation. But there is one more counting, the counting of days of creation. God Himself taught us the power of counting each day and making it matter. Women, from the begining of time, have been coppying this Godly act.

Two kinds of tumah—and why it matters

Parshat Tazria places the yoledet and the metzora side by side, and both are called tamei. The same word requires us to look carefully.

Chazal tie tzaraat to lashon hara—speech that diminishes. The metzora’s tumah marks a vessel that participated in unmaking.

The woman’s tumah marks a vessel that stood at the place where life enters the world. Hers touches creation; his touches its undoing.

Their paths back reflect this difference. The metzora returns through a kohen, through examination and public recognition, because the damage lived between people.

The woman’s return is her own. She prepares, counts, immerses, and rises taharah. The process is intimate because what occurred was intimate.

She is not the metzorah.

What she is returning to

I want to broaden how we speak about mikveh.

We say she is returning to her husband. She is permitted again for intimacy.

This is true, and it is only one part of a much larger truth.

She is returning to herself. To her full standing in the world. To her status as a partner in creation.

In the time of the Beit Hamikdash, she is returning to the ability to enter sacred space—and today, to ascend Har Habayit, to bring a korban, to stand in the presence of the Shechina. Tumah does not only affect her relationship with her husband. It affected her relationship with the entire sacred structure of the universe. And tahara restores all of it.

The period of tumah, understood this way, is a time of stepping back from the role of creator. A deliberate pause. A time of turning inward, contemplation, and moving through seven days with awareness. She remains fully present during this time, turning inward and building. Like the omer, it is a season of growth.

She then emerges, able to stand again at the threshold of creation and to partner with God in the work that only she can do. Returning to the full intimacy—with her husband, with the universe, with sacred space, and with the ongoing act of creation that her body is built to participate in.

The mikveh marks a transition into return.

Why water? Ruach Elohim merachefet al pnei hamayim—in the beginning, before anything had yet been made particular, the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. Water holds pure potential, everything that has not yet become something specific. When she immerses, she returns to that place — briefly, completely — and rises carrying her full creative power, restored, renewed, ready.

The word mikveh shares its root with tikvah—hope. Both come from the root kuf-vav-heh—to gather, to collect, to hold. Yikavu hamayim—let the waters gather, Bereishit tells us. The mikveh is gathered water, and tikvah is what we gather inside ourselves— the holding of what is still possible. She immerses in gathered potential. She rises carrying gathered possibility.

The secret of the counting woman

Here is the idea I want to leave you with.

A woman who understands this experiences her body as something she moves through—with intention, with counting, and with awareness of where she has been and where she is going.

She marks sacred time, stands at thresholds, steps back from creating in order to build, and then steps forward again into her full power.

Every month is a miniature omer. A movement from one standing to another, counted deliberately, arrived at through her own intention and effort.

She is dignified by tumah, because only vessels capable of the highest kedushah carry it at all.

She is not the metzora, whose tumah came from making life smaller. She is the woman who touched creation, stepped back from it with intention, counted her way back to it, and partners again with God in the most extraordinary work a human body can do.

This is your strength, my daughter — quiet, enduring, and deeply rooted.