Is it normal for the husband to become unclean by touching the unclean wife from new birth or niddah?

Question

Is it normal and acceptable according to halacha that the husband inevitably becomes unclean by coming in contact with his wife during niddah period? Or it is very shameful and considered abhorrent, sinful to do so?

Is it shameful, disgraceful, sinful for the husband if he comes in contact with the niddah wife/ new-mother. In other words, during childbirth, is it natural and acceptable that he touches her for any assistance and becomes unclean for a day, or it would be very rare and only accidentally or unlikely that one may frown upon being unclean. Lev 15.19 whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening; and for the new-mother, the man would most likely not touch her until her full purification period of 33 or 66 days completes.

wiki: Impurity after child birth

Within the realm of Biblical law and post-Biblical Jewish religious discourse surrounding tumah and taharah, the impurity is called in Hebrew tumat yoledet. Halakhah treats a yoledet (woman who gives birth) similarly to any woman with niddah status.

In some Jewish communities, ceremonies and a degree of seclusion were applied to postparturient women. For example, there was a Sana Yemenite custom of women visiting the mother during 4–6 weeks after childbirth. The mother would be visited in a special room in her home and she would sit in a decorated triangle box

Post English translations of all your quotes and try to cite old sources. I am asking for historical Jewish practice, not the modern culture which wouldn't observe such rituals.

Answer 1

Most of the laws of ritual impurity don't make a difference today. People have gone to graveyards, but there's not Red Cow ash to purify them from that. Then again, there's no Temple nor sacrifices right now, so if someone's ritually impure, that doesn't really restrict much.

The critical exception is that marital relations are prohibited during the Nidah period. That applies even if everyone is "ritually impure" anyhow because, for instance, they both touched dead lizards today. Or he's an undertaker. There are various verses about this in a few different places in the Bible, and a lot of detail is left to the tradition recorded in the Talmud. Thus, I'll refer you to Maimonides' code, Chapter 4 of Prohibited Relations. (He consolidated the relevant laws in a very clear fashion.) The stuff about ritual impurity vis-a-vis the Temple appears in a different book of his.

Let's grossly oversimplify and say that Nidah begins with the onset of menstrual bleeding. It then continues for five days or the cessation of bleeding, whichever is more; then requires seven clean days; then requires immersion in a Mikvah.

Childbirth basically is treated the same as Nidah today; as bleeding usually can continue for several weeks, it means waiting several weeks for the cessation of bleeding, then seven clean days, then Mikvah.

While a woman is in the state of Nidah, the issue with her husband touching her today has nothing to do with everything you're seeing in Leviticus. It's that once relations are prohibited, they should avoid touching as a way of staying far away from prohibited behavior.

Most Orthodox rabbis today therefore apply those laws directly, and would apply a blanket rule -- once labor starts, the woman is a Nidah, ergo her husband should not touch her until several weeks have passed, plus Mikvah. (And if he does, well ... just don't do it again!)

(If we worried about the technical ritual impurity as you're seeing in Leviticus, then if she sat on a couch at 8am, then went to work, and he sat on the couch at 9am, he'd be "impure" ... again, today, not a problem.)

One could attempt to argue that touch that's purely for emotional support, in a context where it won't lead to anything else, might be different ... but generally the Orthodox position is that a blanket rule was stated, as otherwise everyone would make their own exceptions, and slippery-slope their way from there.