Myśl Żydowska do Psalmów 124:7

Torah legislation, in imposing restrictions, is designed to combat the manner in which the yetzer hara would otherwise gradually succeed to make our mind the tool of our body instead of the other way around. The Torah therefore provides five remedies against the five fronts on which the yetzer hara attacks us. 1) Divine Providence that assists even those who rarely need it, being almost perfect. (such as Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanus) 2) Parents and teachers for those on the level of a Rabbi Joshua ben Chananyah. (happy the woman who bore him) 3) Torah's injunctions and system of reward and punishment. The way of Rabbi Shimori ben Nataniel. (the G'd fearing person) 4) Telling us of the successful lives of those possessed of loving concern for G'ds creatures. (The way of Rabbi Yossi the pious one) 5) Illuminating our minds by its teachings, as illustrated by Rabbi Eleazar ben Arach. (the bubbling well) Proof that niddah of women and keree of the male are similar in nature, part of the general human condition as such, is found in the fact that the changeover from a state of impurity to a state of purity (based on Torah law) is immediate; there is no waiting period after the condition has passed. Zivah, an abnormal flow of blood from the same source, on the other hand, requires a seven day waiting period, suggesting that a severe impurity requires time for its subject to free himself from it completely. It is interesting that the Torah writes the laws of circumcision on the eighth day adjacent to the purification laws of niddah. The male too is purified through circumcision on the eight day. This is the purification from the impurities absorbed by the human species when the first pair of human beings ate from the tree of knowledge at the serpent's behest. If Israel had been purified by the revelation at Mount Sinai, as our sages tell us, (Yevamot 103) this suggests that the purification process had started already previously, and was only completed by that event. From the point of view of what they have in common, zav flux of the male, and zavah flux of the female, should have been written in the Torah side by side. However, the Torah wanted to point out the power of milah, circumcision, as a purifying factor. Rabbi Yochanan points out that impurity is not the result of death, but that death is the result of impurity. He means that a diseased body ( tum-ah ) causes all that it touches to become diseased, and whether death results depends on the intensity of the emanations from that diseased body. In ancient times, among the gentiles, women who menstruated were shunned and kept in quarantine for fear that they might contaminate. Rachel warned her father not to approach her too closely since she had been menstruating at the time. (Genesis 31,35) The lesson we learn from this legislation is that man's mental state has physical effects.