Tips for Jewish Living

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"Can an experience so private really ever be conveyed or understood?" The writer, Eden, poses this question on a public website called Mayim Rabim. Many Waters: Women's Reflections on Mikvah and Taharat Hamishpacha.

The topic of discussion is The Mikvah Project, a book and traveling exhibit. The project records in photographs and stories forty women’s personal mikvah experiences. A senior, for example, tells how she took her mikvah in a freezing, secret ritual pool dug under a neighbor’s kitchen floor in Soviet Russia, an act done despite the fact that it could have led to her imprisonment in Siberia. Along with these stories are historical prints and drawings of mikva'ot (the Hebrew plural of mikvah) and carefully modest underwater photographs of women inside a mikvah pool, although these are all of models hired for this purpose. Still, they evoke a sense of intimacy. And maybe even holiness.

Life, according to both ancient and modern wisdom, began in water. All of us emerged from a watery womb as new human beings and somehow we never forget this. Mikvah means gathering, or collection. In the Jewish tradition, women and men re-enact spiritual, not physical, renewal and birth by immersing in this gathering of water. Its significance in early Jewish life is exemplified by the Talmudic mandate that the synagogue as well as the Torah scrolls could be sold if a community could not otherwise afford to build a mikvah. Even the desert fortress of Masada had two public mikva’ot.

For many observant Jews, this immersion begins the cycle of sexual relations based on women's menstrual phases, starting on the eve of the wedding ceremony. It is used as the end of separation in the same way that Havdalah marks the end of Shabbat and the beginning of the workweek. In early shtetl life the mikvah was custom, social event and religious obligation. Women have taken a ritual that once cast a specter of shame about their bodies and reclaimed it as a spiritual rite of transition. Along with its common use as the final step in conversion to Judaism, the mikvah is now entered as preparation for taking on a new role or letting go of an old one. It is enacted along with prayers for recovery from illness or abuse or in celebration of a new blessing in one's life.

Wonder where to find a mikvah? In places where no human-built mikvah was available, people used natural springs or the ocean. The less-halachically inclined have used hot tubs or other private vessels of water. A kosher mikvah is built into the structure of a building and holds two hundred gallons of rain-touched or river-collected water. We have at least one kosher mikvah here in Eugene, including Mikvah Miriam. You can point your computer toward www.Mikvah.org, to the Global Mikvah Directory, to find mikva'ot in cities across the U.S. and overseas.

RECLAIMING MIKVEH: Pouring Ancient Waters into a Contemporary Vessel.

Clergy, educators, Jewish professionals and lay leaders will want to attend this national conference offering new possibilities for spirituality, growth and renewal:

June 4-6, Boston, MA
Co-sponsored by JRF.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Rabbi Norman Cohen, Anita Diamant and Barry Shrage. Other speakers include Lori Lefkovitz, Director of KOLOT: The Center for Jewish Women's and Gender Studies at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. For more information, please visit www.mayyimhayyim.org/conference.