Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

so therre's this rabbi in the Talmud who there are lots of stories about.  in one story he is basically a cop.  When he sees that the people he turns over to the authorities are punished or killed, he feels so bad he decides he needs to repent.  As penance, he tells his wife to put a sheet underneath his body every night for sixty days.  Every morning for the sixty days he wakes up and has bled all over the sheet.  Judith Z. Abrams says that the sheets are a reference to the sheets used to deliver a baby, or this is a reference to menstrual blood.  Somehow embodying femaleness was a way to repent.