Training Mikveh Ladies — and Other Lessons in Immersion
The staff at Mayyim Hayyim: Living Waters Community Mikveh loves to think up catchy program titles having to do with — what else — water. Their latest wordplay, “Gathering the Waters: Ancient Ritual, Open Access and New Meaning,” was a spectacular, bustling conference, held earlier this week and dedicated to all things mikveh.
Mayyim Hayyim — its recent conference brought together 250 people from 22 states and Israel — has been on an upward trajectory since its founding a decade ago. Among the reasons for the mikveh’s success is the passion and dedication of its founder and president, best-selling author Anita Diamant. (“The Red Tent”) Diamant, together with the organization’s executive director Aliza Kline, wanted a mikveh that passed muster with Jewish law, but was also beautiful and inclusive.
In the interest of full disclosure I have volunteered as well as freelanced for Mayyim Hayyim in the past. Three years ago I coordinated a small conference called “Mainstream,” designed for Jewish professionals aspiring to implement the Mayyim Hayyim model in their own communities. Looking back, “Mainstream” was to “Gathering the Water”s what a brook is to a river.
In 2010, the conference relocated from the renovated Victorian house in West Newton that is home to Mayyim Hayyim’s sparkling two mikva’ot to the much larger Temple Shalom a mile down the road. Over the course of two days, the congregation’s three floors buzzed with 25 workshops that included: “The Mikveh Lady Has Left the Building: Training and Sustaining Volunteer Guides”; “The Family Mikveh: Programming for Young Couples and Bat Mitzvah Girls and Their Moms”; and “OMG: Tools for Teaching Mikveh to Teens.”
I was first exposed to a mikveh as an 8th grader attending the very traditional Hebrew Academy of Greater Hartford. The mikveh lesson came with a warning that felt quite dire to a 13-year-old girl. I was told that when I menstruated as a married woman I couldn’t so much as hold my husband’s hand or even directly pass him something as innocuous as a plate. The rabbis of the Talmud implemented the laws of family purity for my spiritual and physical well-being. It was the first time I thought my body could be impure.
Fast-forward two decades later to a rabbi’s office where I’m very clear that I will not immerse in a mikveh before my wedding. To have and to hold me is to embrace me — impurities and all. Mayyim Hayyim — a mikveh where a woman could peacefully float in “living waters” before her wedding — was still 15 years into the future.
But when it arrived it was there for a woman finishing a grueling course of chemotherapy. It was a mikveh to come out as a lesbian or homosexual. It was a mikveh to celebrate a milestone birthday, an upcoming marriage or the renewal of sexual love between partners. It was there for me, when I immersed for the first time to mark my daughter’s bat mitzvah. Mayyim Hayyim is a spa for the soul.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
