By: Elicia Brown
"Mikvah?" my mother exclaimed, as if I'd proposed we blast ourselves to the moon. "Let's just say maybe."
As Jewish brides have done for hundreds of years, I planned to immerse myself in one of the sacred pools of the mikvah, the ritual bathhouse. I longed to sink beneath its warm waters, to take a spiritual break from my prewedding jitters—and to mark a moment in time as I made the transition from one family to the next.
But these were largely uncharted waters for me, for my mother, and, for that matter, even for my grandmother, who seemed only vaguely familiar with the practice.
What's more, a generation of feminists frowned on the ritual of mikvah, wary of dredging up ancient menstrual taboos. Traditionally, and in religiously observant circles today, women abstain from sex during and for several days after their periods. It is only after a plunge in the ritual bath that they resume physical intimacy with their spouse. While I now understand that many observant women have reconsidered and reframed the traditional notion of impure days (before the plunge) and pure days (after the plunge and until their next period) so that they feel empowered by mikvah, at the time I couldn't escape the feeling that the whole practice suggests there's something dirty about menstruation.
So, though I yearned to submerge, I felt uneasy. I didn't study the rules for weeks as some religiously observant brides do. In fact, I didn't intend to visit beyond this one time. Would the staff reject me? Eject me?
Once I was inside, a stout no-nonsense woman known as the "mikvah lady" immediately directed me to a changing room. Since I had prepared for the mikvah at home—bathed for a half hour, clipped and cleaned my nails, and brushed and flossed my teeth—I quickly undressed and headed toward the holy water.
Mikvah is often said to sanctify a marriage, to create a kind of spiritual ménage à trois with God. But plunging into the bath's depths for a third time as the mikvah lady shouted "kosher" to show I had fully submerged, I found myself less mindful of the divine than of the faint odor of chlorine.
"So?" my sister Nina asked when I emerged dripping into the daylight.
Anticlimactic is how I described it then. But if I were to do it all over again now, not quite a decade later, I would be awash in a new wave of mikvahs—offering greater opulence and possibilities. Recenly, mikvahs have undergone a dramatic face-lift, drawing new users as well as uses. The splashiest new facility is slated to open in Los Angeles in 2010, an $18 million, 7,500-square-foot mega-mikvah and education center.
Still, many aspects of mikvah remain the same. If you step into your average ritual bathhouse, you will find a small waiting area like that in a doctor's office. An attendant will probably lead you to a preparation room stocked with towels, toiletries, and a shower and/or a tub. In the adjoining room, you will find the mikvah, resembling a rather deep, tiny pool.
Many of the newer facilities indulge a visitor's senses, featuring scented candles, piped-in music, marble flooring, and plush robes. But the mikvah is not the Jewish equivalent of a Russian or Swedish bath. You don't go to the mivkah for a schvitz, but rather to regulate sexual desires, to mark a distinction between the holy time after the plunge and the not-as-holy time before. The Talmud devotes an entire tractate to the laws surrounding its use and construction.
Traditionally, the mikvah has largely served a Jewish sisterhood, but its depths have also purified dishes as well as people, and men as well as women. A convert submerges in the final moment before adopting Judaism. Many devout men visit the mikvah before Yom Kippur, and some do so before each Shabbat.
In recent years, a new kind of mikvah fan has surfaced. In an incipient but growing phenomenon, liberal-minded Jews—who have largely shunned the practice in recent decades—are taking the plunge after cancer treatments, miscarriages, or milestone birthdays. These women, and a few men, mark life's transitions by submerging into the womb-like comfort of the mikvah.
Farrah Rubenstein, who is 32 and belongs to a Conservative synagogue, before donating a kidney to her mother, sought solace with her ailing parent in the ritual bath. Suzanne Hanser, 55, created a mikvah ceremony after her last child left home for college. "There was an intimacy with the water," she recalls. "I couldn't breathe but it felt like no other physical embrace."
Even bat mitzvah girls like Avital Hamilton, 13, can be buoyed by the waters of mikvah. Avital unwound during a private ceremony with her mother, in advance of the public one the following day, when 800 congregants watched as she chanted Torah.
In the past, the practice of immersion "didn't belong to me. It didn't belong to us," says Anita Diamant, author of The Red Tent and a founder of Mayyim Hayyim, Living Waters Community Mikveh and Education Center in the Boston area. The mikvah, which opened in 2004 and welcomes alternative immersions, has been serving as a role model for other liberal-minded facilities springing up around the country. Diamant says she now immerses herself prior to the High Holy Days: "The experience is as close to meditation as I get."
"Mikvah is the new, exciting spiritual kid on the block," says Vanessa Ochs, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virgina and the author of Inventing Jewish Ritual. But if there's an undercurrent of curiosity about alternative immersions, there's a floodtide of renewed interest in traditional monthly visits to the ritual bath. "Mikvah has stepped out of its shadow in the last 10 years," says Rivkah Slonim, author of Total Immersion: A Mikvah Anthology, a collection of essays on
the topic. Not too long ago, women—and even their rabbis—fretted about the unsanitary state of the ritual bath. Many of the newest mikvahs allow users to soak in luxury. Slonim's Hasidic sect, Chabad-Lubavitch, has built hundreds of mikvahs around the world in the last decade, planting them in remote outposts of Jewish life as well as amid buzzing metropolises. There are at least 1,600 ritual baths throughout the world, according to www.mikvah.org. Women who adhere to the Jewish laws that govern sexual intimacy visit the mikvah approximately two weeks after the onset of their period. Many practitioners rave about the "sex benefits" of mikvah, and about the heartfelt conversations with their husbands that transpire during the two weeks or so each month before their immersions, when they are required to refrain from physical intimacy. "While sex the Jewish way cannot save a bad marriage, it can make a good one transcendent," writes Gila Berkowitz in an essay in Total Immersion. I'm intrigued by women's descriptions of "mikvah night" (a less-than-subtle euphemism for sex night). But as the mother of young children, craving quiet moments of reflection, I'm equally entranced by descriptions of the mikvah visit itself. "A woman takes a deep breath, takes stock of her body and her soul in preparation for immersion. It's an oasis in time. It's a taste of Shabbat during the week," says Andrea Wershof Schwartz, a 26-year-old medical student in New York. Shabbat? Saunas? Serenity! I have a milestone birthday approaching—perhaps I'll celebrate with a splash.
