Q&A: Early Study of the Laws of Niddah
Early Study of the Laws of Niddah
Question
What do you think is the right thing to do (for yeshiva boys and religious people):
Should the topic of the laws of niddah also be opened up to young boys, so that they study Tractate Niddah the way they study Bava Kamma (but that is dangerous, because maybe it will lead to forbidden thoughts and fantasies, while on the other hand the gain is that when they get married they will already have a foundation for understanding and properly observing the laws of niddah in a much more serious way than a boring weekly class a few months before the wedding allows),
or should we continue as we do today (placing the young man in front of the female world only a few months before the wedding)?
Answer
This is a question for educators and psychologists. I don’t think I have any added value on this issue.
For my part, I would estimate that when the boys study this, they are not imagining a woman in front of them, but rather dealing with it as abstract phenomena (as Rabbi Chaim did with frying pans, taking them out of the kitchen), somewhat like “a craftsman is preoccupied with his craft.” You can see that when they study very strange topics, or even ones that are morally disturbing, the students usually do not bat an eyelash. Some interpret that negatively (that it simply doesn’t interest them), but I don’t think that is necessarily so. They engage with it as a body of knowledge and handle it accordingly. See my remarks (Columns 467, 89) about the blood tube at the Technion.
Discussion on Answer
It’s not really a story. People commonly say in the yeshiva world that Rabbi Chaim took the frying pans out of the kitchen. From his perspective, a frying pan is a theoretical utensil with such-and-such properties. He had no idea what a frying pan looked like in an actual kitchen.
Could you tell the story about Rabbi Chaim? 🙂