With the evolution of Yoatzots – female halachic advisers to other women regarding the laws of family purity – one might think that these advisers would have the authority to poskin on niddah shailas. There are those Yoatzots who go even further in their training to become “niddah nurses” or “bodeket taharah” who are trained to do gynecological speculum exams to determine if the source of a woman’s bleeding is from the uterus or from a wound, thus more accurately determining if the woman is a niddah or not.
However, even with the advancement of highly trained female experts in the area of niddah, none of the women currently acting as advisers serve as poseks, or a final authority on a woman’s status, nor is that their goal. Rather, their role is to act as an intermediary between a woman and a rabbi.
The role of an intermediary is essential, as many women don’t view their rabbi in the same vein as a doctor, despite exhortations from kallah teachers that a rabbi functions in the same manner. Many women are reluctant to expose personal information such as details about their intimate life and bodily functions to a man they have heretofore known only from a professional distance.
Often, this professional distance between women and their rabbis is protected by an anonymous system of shaila envelopes. Basically, a woman can put a bedika cloth (white square inspection cloth), her underwear with the questionable stain, or the cut-out crotch of suspicious underwear into a sealed envelope (unmarked but for a phone number) and pop it into the rabbi’s mailbox. If she doesn’t mind being identified, she might ring the door bell and hand the envelope to the rabbi’s wife, but she risks the door being answered by the rabbi himself or his children. Some women send their husbands to the rabbi with the envelope, but many men are just as embarrassed as their wives by the task.
Essentially, the more anonymous the process, the higher the comfort level is for most women. This desire for anonymity can limit the flow (forgive the pun) of information the rabbi is given about the shaila in front of him. Questions such as what day the woman is at in her cycle, if she is post-partum, if she had a recent medical procedure, etc. can all help determine the status of the shaila.
While follow-up questions via telephone can help clear up some of those answers, a more in depth conversation could prove more enlightening and help a woman remain tahor or hasten becoming tahor. Female Yoatzots help to more comfortably facilitate those conversations, as they relay those details to a rabbi for women who aren’t comfortable doing so themselves.
However, when it comes to making the final call on a niddah shaila, even those pioneer women who have studied, certified, and taken it upon themselves to become instructors in hilchos niddah agree that a man should be the ultimate authority on determining a woman’s status. In the end, it’s a rabbi who must assess our discharges and confer a halachic state of tumah or tahara.
While many women today have female bosses, physicians, and teachers, in the orthodox world, females are taught that ultimate leadership rests with the men. I recall one such comment made by a woman on a post I wrote critiquing the installation of an all-male board for our local mikvah association –
“…men are less emotional and would probably think more logically and differently them a woman. i’m all pro male judges/leaders. I’m super petrified of potentially hormonal irrational females. and yes, i’m female myself.”
A similar sentiment is seen here in in this book excerpt from The House of Secrets: The Hidden World of the Mikveh by Varda Polak-Sahm. The excerpt gives an example of the dismissal of a balanit/mikvah lady’s determination that a post cosmetic surgery patient can’t immerse until her stitches are removed:
This passage made me see things in a slightly different way regarding the debate between women and intrusive mikvah ladies. While I am just as against unjustified intrusion as the next woman, I can’t help but wonder if the same battles would be fought if mikvahs were staffed by male rabbis. After all, I myself submitted to the ultimate mikvah intrusion by rabbis when I was a young woman and felt powerless to say a word. I’m not saying it would be better to suffer indignities in silence, but I’m merely making an observation that women are far quicker to speak out against female authority than male authority.
Mikvah ladies are the closest things we have to female halachic poseks, as they are on the front lines determining whether a woman can or can’t immerse. Look at all the trouble and resentment that can be caused by even that little bit of authority! As women, aren’t we also guilty of being critical of feminine religious authority simply by virtue of gender? Do we, as Jewish women, perpetuate the dis-empowerment of fellow Jewish women as religious leaders?
