Who am I? Why am I doing this? And what should we all expect?

Instead of starting with who I am, I feel it’s better in this case to say who I am not. I am not a “Jewish Professional”, I’m just a person who happens to be Jewish. I am not an Orthodox Jew, and I am not an expert in halacha. I don’t follow halacha in the way that many would define it (although I feel like the term halacha is more flexible than many people believe it to be). I’m also not a practiced blogger, so the idea of starting a blog about something that’s so intimate and personal for so many people is intimidating. I’m not a writer, unless you count technical articles, but even then I haven’t published many.

Ok, so who am I then? I’m Jennie, an American Jew living in London. I am an engineer by trade, and I’m pursuing a Ph.D. in Engineering at the University of Cambridge. I’m a very new mom (or mum) – my son was born just a couple of months ago. I’m doing this all as a personal passion project.

I am completely unqualified to speak about mikveh and niddah. And that’s exactly why I’m doing this.

I’m always looking at “traditional” Jewish practices and evaluating if and how they fit into my life, or if and how I want to change my life to incorporate them. When my husband and I decided we wanted to start a family, I looked into niddah as a possibility of a practice I may want to take on, in some form. I was already working on getting to know my body’s natural fertility cycle, and I believed taking on some form of a niddah practice, whether traditional or modified, would be a Jewish way of marking this awareness.

However, when I looked into the rules of niddah as laid out in Leviticus and the Talmud, I was shocked. A minimum of four days of “unclean” status (if following Sephardic minhag) plus a minimum of seven “clean” days before immersion would mean a minimum eleven days of separation from one’s partner before any intimacy would be allowed. The Ashkenazic minhag is a minimum of five days of “unclean” status. There was a flaw that I could already see in this system, based on the fact that I was tracking my fertility cycles already. I knew that in most months I ovulated on day ten of my cycle, meaning I would not be able to get pregnant after the eleventh day of my cycle. So if I were to follow these rules, I would find it nearly impossible to get pregnant naturally.

I’ve since learned that this issue is called halachic infertility and there are a few options that exist in the Orthodox world to address the issue. I still am working on researching more about those options, but my current understanding is that many of those options involve taking medication to delay ovulation each month. To me, that sort of a practice would feel hollow and disconnected from the natural cycles that I wanted to mark in the first place. I decided I would instead craft a practice and ritual that made more sense to me from a modern and scientific perspective, so that I could also touch on that spiritual side. This website and blog is going to document my journey in this regard.

So what should we expect? Like my first question, I think it’s easier to start with what this project will not be. One, this will not be an attempt at rewriting halacha for people who are satisfied with halacha or those who believe it cannot be rewritten. This will not be an attempt to say that my ritual that I eventually define is what our sages were thinking from the very beginning. I will not be saying that my version is “right”, but present it as an option for people who think similarly to me.

What will this be in general? Well, at first it’s going to be a series of blog posts much like this one, that document my thoughts about these matters. I’m going to attempt to be in touch with people who are genuine experts in these matters. I’m also going to dive into the source material, commentaries, and academic papers that concern all these issues. I want to connect ancient practices to our modern age, including what we know with our scientific knowledge already. And eventually, I hope to craft a niddah practice that will be meaningful to me, and maybe meaningful to at least one other person in the world.

Wish me luck!