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about the law and practice of tumah and taharah from biblical times to the present. Some
traditional ceremonies, such as the custom of Sephardic women celebrating with a bride as she
goes to the mikveh for the first time, or reciting special t’chinot (women’s prayers) before and
after going to the mikveh, have been revived or widely adopted in order to enhance the experience
of immersion (see Diamant, Anita. The New Jewish Wedding. Fireside, 1985, p. 152-154).
Because mikveh is one of the only Jewish practices that was largely associated with women, many
women desire to reclaim it, in order to retain a practice that has been uniquely associated with
women.
Rethinking mikveh: The Case of Rachel Adler
As a young Orthodox woman, Rachel Adler wrote a seminal article re-envisioning tumah and
taharah, ritual purity and impurity, as a positive experience for women (Adler, Rachel. “Tumah
and Taharah: Endings and Beginnings.” The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives. Ed. Elizabeth
Koltun. Schocken Books, 1976). Like many modern Jewish women, Adler sought to reclaim
Jewish traditions about women by reinterpreting them in a positive way. Adler spoke eloquently of
how women, through their menses, embody the cosmic cycle of life, death, and rebirth, of
darkness and light. She imagined menstruation as symbolic of loss, and mikveh as an expression
of hope and life-giving potential. Adler pointed out that in Temple times purity and impurity
applied to everyone, not only to women. She suggested that the forces of life and death, expressed
through the ancient dichotomy of tumah and taharah, were both ultimately good, and that both
menstrual separation and the return to sexual activity were holy phases of a woman’s life. Many
women were convinced by Adler’s ideas, and it is now commonplace for Jewish women who
write about mikveh to assert what Adler dared to put forward when it was a radical thought: that
“impurity” and “purity” are equal parts of a sacred cycle. Adler created a way of looking at
mikveh that allowed many women to feel good about mikveh as a spiritual practice.
Adler herself, over decades, came to believe that she had been wrong in her thinking. The women
who met her at conferences and praised her for her ideas saddened and embarrassed her. Finally,
twenty-five years later as a Reform theologian, she wrote a second article (”In Your Blood, Live:
Re-visions of a Theology of Purity,” in Lifecycles 2: Jewish Women on Biblical Themes in
Contemporary Life, ed. Debra Orenstein and Jane Rachel Litman, Jewish Lights, 1997) in which
she rejected her former philosophy. In this second article, Adler asserted that her first theory of
mikveh had been a “slave theology” that purported to sanctify women while enabling their
oppression. Adler pointed out that while she claimed that impurity applied to women and men, in
actual Jewish life it only applied to women, thus associating women with death. She also reanalyzed
biblical texts and indicated that while she imagined niddah (menstrual impurity) as a
morally neutral term, the Bible used it as a word for corruption and filth (Lamentations 1:8,17).
Adler indicated that her experience of Orthodox practice was that women were labeled as impure
and were shut out from reading Torah or even from shaking hands with men because of this
designation. She feared that her theology had provided an apologia for misogynistic practices, and
wished to replace it with a theology in which purity and bodily reality can co-exist.
Adler’s two articles represent the poles of Jewish women’s experience regarding mikveh. From an
uncritical acceptance of the ancient laws, Adler moved to an utter rejection of them, expressing the
desire to re-imagine the entire Jewish definition of purity. Yet in her later article Adler praises the
new and creative uses of mikveh that women have developed in recent years. Rabbi Elyse
Goldstein trumpets creative approaches to the mikveh as a way of fundamentally altering the
ritual’s impact: “We reject its principal import as a tool of marriage and we open up other avenues
for meaning…dip on Rosh Chodesh (the new moon)…open the mikveh during the day… turn the
mikveh into a Jewish women’s learning center….” (Goldstein, Elyse. ReVisions: Seeing Torah
Through a Feminist Lens. Key Porter Books, 1998, p. 127-128). The alternative uses of mikveh
that women and men have invented clearly play a role, for both traditional and non-traditional
Jews, in redefining what mikveh means to the Jewish community.