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Excerpted from "Total Immersion: A Mikvah Anthology",
edited by Rivkah Slonim.
I live on the unfashionable west side of Santa Fe, where the neighborhood is small and funky, adobe houses sitting in well-tended yards of flax and hollyhocks or the neglected ones of dirt and panic grass with a few old car parts thrown in. Old men stand watering the small laws with garden hoses innocent of nozzles. Every house has a dog, and every dog barks as I pass. This is a neighborhood visited by the moon and by drunks staggering from the liquor store; it is a neighborhood in which no one will win the lottery.
Within the blocks I walk, though, there is a passion of belief. My elderly neighbor Grace C. Baca wears a Virgin of Guadalupe pin; windows are numerous with the statues of saints dressed in rosaries. Down the block is the massage school for holistic healing, the Spanish Pentecostal Church, and turning the corner is my own husband, Robert, driving a Cherokee Jeep with a cracked windshield. He is a Zen Buddhist priest, head shaved, Bodhi beads wrapped around his wrist.
Around the corner, on Franklin Street, is my Hebrew teacher's house. As I walk I can feel prayer rise from the asphalt like mist after rain. My heart beats as I turn up her driveway and knock on her door. In this kitchen, on an old-fashioned lacy oilcloth, I have learned the Hebrew vowels and how to light the Shabbat candles; I have worried about Jacob's two wives and my own sister Rachel; I have learned an alphabet that once was forbidden.
I was raised to believe that although I was Jewish, and that this was a vastly superior way to be, religion itself was superstition and ignorance. My father instructed us: God is for children and morons, there is no God, and most important, my father decides what we believe. Without God, rabbi, or synagogue, my father's spiritual authority in the family was absolute. He controlled it all, and he proclaimed: You are an atheist.
"When the student is ready, the teacher appears."
I did not even dare to break the injunction until I was almost 40. Gradually I felt the pull. I put a mezuzah on my newly built studio. I told my friend Carol I was longing for something Jewish. When she told me there was a Hassidic woman who taught Kaballah literally around the corner from me, I knew I had to go study. When I called Yehudis and told her how surprised I was to find her, she said: "When the student is ready, the teacher appears."
As soon as I learn the Hebrew alphabet, I begin to dream. I see the letters, large and dark, rising up like gates over me as I turn in my sleep. I'm reading whatever I can get my hands on about Judaism and feminism, women, spirituality. I'm trying to find a place for myself in a tribe I felt was made of old men wrapped in tallises, with no place for me. I keep coming upon the idea of mikvah, a pool, water; it has my favorite letter "mem" in it, after all -- my name is Miriam with two "mems" in it, and Miriam's Well is a source of water, of inspiration, of healing, that follows me no matter how lost I am.
After Hebrew lessons, Yehudis takes me to her backyard to show me something, but somehow we get sidetracked, and she ends up opening the door to what I always assumed was a greenhouse. Inside it is a mikvah, a pool that appeared just for me. This is the only mikvah in New Mexico, perhaps the only one for a thousand miles. And it's right around the corner from me.
I go home thinking, "I have just got to get into it." It's becoming an obsession; I want in even if I don't know why. I start to dream about the mikvah, I can't shake the dreams. Finally I just tell Yehudis, "I want to get into this mikvah." I know there must be lots of rules, and there are. She tells me to read a book on how it's done. I start reading. I knew that I had to wait until my period, but I didn't quite realize I had to be celibate for at least twelve days.
I plop down next to my husband. I tell him I won't do this, it's ridiculous. But he is the one to encourage me and insist I do it properly. Here is a man who shaves his head and has a Japanese name, who has sat for seven days cross-legged facing a wall. He believes in ritual. He is also a Jewish boy from New Jersey. He has never been anything but positive about my foray into Judaism. It is as if he believes more than I do that it is right for me. "Twelve days," I tell him, half hoping he'll insist that I'm so irresistible it can't be done. But he tells me it's fine.
I don't like this period of separation, and I didn't learn much from it except for bad things I already knew -- I'm dependent and needy and scared of space. I don't think I need this mikvah for my marriage. After all, we've been together for a dozen years, we have a daughter, we've withstood sickness and death and mortgage. More important, because Robert has lived off and on in Zen monasteries and because I am a writer, there is some solitude built into the relationship, some chosen path.
So I continue -- not for my marriage, but for me. At least I have stopped dreaming every night about a mikvah I can't get into. When the right night arrives, I take a long bath and scrub with a loofah and fancy face scrub. I lounge. Sunset hits the corner of the bathroom window. I go to a Kaballah class at the shul, come home and get a towel, then drive to the mikvah around ten o'clock at night. I don't want to walk in this neighborhood at this hour. I'm singing in my blue Toyota, out of the house, out of time, out under the cover of darkness. I feel the way I did when I rushed to the birth of my friend Debora's son.
I'm full of joy, this is real, I'm in the pool, the pool is in me, this is where I belong.
The mikvah room seems to glow with blue light. I walk backward down the ladder into the pool. After the first immersion I can hardly breathe, my heart is pounding, my lungs seem to want water instead of air, everything is turning blue. I'm full of joy, this is real, I'm in the pool, the pool is in me, this is where I belong. Yehudis holds a scarf over my head, and I repeat the prayer after her. My mind is a blank; I couldn't do it myself. I go under again and again. Now I'm laughing and getting dressed, I'm going home.
It is Rosh Chodesh of Elul, a month to Rosh Hashanah. There is no moon in the sky. I did this to mark a conversion of sorts, of my own turning. I did this because secretly I hoped, secretly I knew or hoped I knew, that there was a place for me as a woman among Jews. This pool at Yehudis's house, marked with traces of New Mexico rain, was an entry way, a beginning. I went down into the pool, into the letter mem, into the moonless sky, into my name.
Excerpted from "Total Immersion: A Mikvah Anthology", edited by Rivkah Slonim. To order a copy, email: rslonim@chabadofbinghamton.com
(19) Anonymous , April 12, 2005
I am newly married and struggling a bit with the concept of niddah and mikvah. Miriam's beautifully written article has reconnected me to the unique priviledge of being given the opportunity to understand the wisdom of the Zohar and the key to real fulfillment.
(18) ARLEEN B. , August 29, 2004
I enjoyed reading this so much. I am so happy that this young lady found her way back home for her soul to Judaism.
(17) sam , August 18, 2004
Dear Miriam - What a beautiful piece! I recognised your name straight away as I have a Jewish Women of New Mexico poetry anthology and your writing there jumped out at me! I'm going to be in Santa Fe over this Rosh Hashana and would love to meet you and your teacher and get some tips on good spiritual ways to start the New Year (would also love to experience the mikvah!) Feel free to be in touch (AISH will have my e-mail address) - blessings to you!
(16) Anonymous , August 16, 2004
How very true. When the pupil is ready the teacher appears. I know because it happened to me. A former Catholic, I left because I simply can not agree with the doctrine. I tried different Protestant denominations but the nagging voice about whether Christianity in any form is true made me look to Judaism.
Indeed when the time was right for me- as I believe it was pre-ordained- I found the shul and the rabbi to whom I am most indebted. I converted and am most happy to have done so.
May you find much joy in your journey to your roots and best of everything.
David Avraham
(15) Michele , August 16, 2004
my mother's mikvah story
I am a baalas teshuva, and since my marriage, I have been going to the mikvah. At different times in our marriage,I have sometimes felt more or less positively about the awesome responsibility placed upon me, alone, as the woman in our family, to fulfill. However, I continued to go, usually with joy and anticipation, while at other times the stresses of everyday life weighed me down. But most often I entered the waters of the mikvah with hope and prayers to G'd for certain brachos that I beseeched him for at the times of my immersion, a time when I felt closest to Him.
Over time, my mother and I discussed this mitzvah and she expressed a curiosity about the mikvah; I even brought her to a neighborhood mikvah for a tour. Several years ago, my mother, may she live until 120 years, was diagnosed with leukemia, and after many years of sitting on the fence, she finally decided to (literally) dive in, and go to the mikvah. What an unbelievable experience for us to share as mother and daughter! It was an exhilerating, awe inspiring moment, one that will stay with me always, my mother emerging, soaking wet and newly born, purified and full of hope, with our prayers raining down on her for a refuah shlaimah! I was so glad that through my persistence in trying to fulfill this mitzvah, my mother had had the opportunity to fulfill it in such a meaningful way as well. I truly believe that her going to the mikvah has been a continuing source of bracha/blessings for her and my father, and for her children and grandchildren as well. May this very special mitzvah contine to be a source of blessing for you, and may it be a conduit for you to continue in your journey to discover your place among the women of Israel.