A Cycle of Separation and Return

Niddah names both the Jewish legal category of ritual status a woman enters with the onset of menstrual bleeding and the body of law, running from Leviticus through the Mishnah's dedicated tractate of the same name and the later codes that elaborate it, governing conduct during this period, which suspends physical contact, including affectionate as well as sexual contact, between a married couple from the onset of bleeding through a subsequent count of seven clean days confirmed free of bleeding, considerably longer in total than the menstrual period itself for most women, a duration that is a distinctive and sometimes surprising feature of the practice to those unfamiliar with it. The period closes with immersion in a mikveh, the ritual bath, which halakha treats as the specific act that ends the state of niddah and permits the couple's marital relations to resume, tying this practice directly to mikveh immersion as one of its central applications alongside the other uses of ritual bathing addressed elsewhere in the atlas.