Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

Mikvah for Our Times

I feel very blessed that my introduction to the spiritual practice of mikvah (ritual immersion) was outside of a traditional context.  During the summer season when I lived at Elat Chayyim in 1999, the Jewish retreat center that was in the Catskills (now relocated to the Isabella Freedman Center in the Connecticut Berkshires), we were invited to prepare for Shabbat every Friday afternoon in a communal mikvah experience (in single gender groups). 

The staff group often went down to the local stream (although we’d look forward to jumping into the retreat hot tub afterwards to warm up!).  I’m not sure I can explain why, but being with a group of people who had been working hard all week to help make the retreat center run who, together, symbolized moving into what I like to call “A Shabbes state of mind” by drawing on this ancient Jewish ritual of immersion, was incredibly powerful and spiritual.

The next time I had a mikvah experience was shortly before I began rabbinical school in London.  The Reform headquarters, which is where Leo Baeck College is also housed, had a mikvah which was primarily used by people before they got married, or by those who had come before the Reform Beit Din (Jewish law court) for conversion.  A friend and I decided to create our own ritual of transition to mark this important change in our lives as we entered a new phase in our careers and in our commitment to Jewish community and learning.

Mikvah has had something of a renewal in Jewish communities of all denominations in recent years.  The community mikvah in Boston, Mayyim Hayyim, (http://bit.ly/cclSes) which has produced wonderful resources and educational programs, has contributed enormously to this resurgence.  Men and women are seeing mikvah as a spiritual practice that can be enormously helpful beyond the traditional categories of marriage, conversion, or matters of “ritual purity” that we Reform Jews have not found to be particularly meaningful to our modern lives. 

Mikvah has been used by survivors of cancer, after a miscarriage, to prepare for a new phase in one’s life (marriage, divorce, retirement, adult bat or bar mitzvah, a new job, moving to a new place, menopause), and much more.

Here in Bridgeport we are blessed to have a very local mikvah that is open to the whole community to use (this is a blessing; there are towns where the mikvah is tightly controlled by an Orthodox community who may not ‘allow’ Reform Jews to utilize the facility for some of these contemporary applications). 

Mikvah Israel was renovated last summer and is now a simple, graceful and wonderful resource for us all.  We can support it by using it, and with our donations, to help with its modest but ongoing needs, so that it is always there for us.  On April 20th I’ll be sharing mikvah stories from ancient history to the present at Coffee and Conversation, which will include a visit to Mikvah Israel on Stratfield Ave.  If you would like to visit the mikvah on another occasion, or would like to learn more about how you could use the mikvah to mark an important transition in your life, please do give me a call at the Temple.

Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz