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Creative Practices
How have Jewish ritual-makers reconstructed the practice of mikveh in new ways? Elyse
Goldstein’s early article “Take Back the Waters,” published in Lilith in 1986 (vol. 15), was one of
the first voices that trumpeted mikveh not as an agent of repurification after menstruation, but as a
ritual of rebirth during both joyful and difficult times. Goldstein and others pointed out that the
ritual bath, traditionally an agent of cleansing and changing, could be used to mourn a miscarriage,
recover from a rape, or seek healing from an illness. Women rabbinical students could immerse in
a mikveh to celebrate ordination. Women could use mikveh as men had traditionally used it, to
welcome the Sabbath or prepare for the High Holidays. The options were limitless. While for
some Jews these options were additions to the traditional ritual, for others, these new practices
replaced the menstruation-related uses of the mikveh.
Now many Jewish feminist ritual-makers have composed new prayers and ceremonies using
mikveh as a spiritual symbol of rebirth or renewal. Rabbi Laura Geller, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb,
Rabbi Vicki Hollander, and others have written new ceremonies that use mikveh for creative
healing or transitional rituals (A Breath of Life, p. 137). Others use mikveh to mark periods of
mourning death, divorce, or other traumas. Laura Levitt and Sue Ann Wasserstein movingly
recount an immersion ritual meant to heal a woman after the trauma of rape (in Four Centuries of
Jewish Women’s Spirituality, ed. Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton, Beacon Press, 1992, p. 321-
326). Some people also use mikveh as the center of a covenanting ceremony for baby girls,
connecting the flowing waters with the new baby girl’s potential for creativity and life-giving
(Fishman, Sylvia Barack. A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community,
Brandeis University Press, 1993, p. 125). Arthur Waskow and Phyllis Berman write in their lifecycle
book A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2002) that
mikveh “might provide the pool of meaning through which a baby girl enters the covenant” (p.
24). And some have written new prayers to focus the soul during immersion (Rose, Carol.
“Introduction to Kavvanot for the mikveh.” Worlds of Jewish Prayer: A Festschrift in Honor of
Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi. Eds. Shohama Harris-Wiener and Jonathan Omer-Man.
Jason Aronson, 1993).
Some have even created spiritual “mikvaot” out of swimming pools, air, music or loving hands.
The idea is to create the feel of a mikveh rather than to conform to the Jewish legal requirements
of a ritual bath. Penina Adelman’s Miriam’s Well, a guide to Rosh Chodesh rituals, celebrates the
going out of Egypt with a “mikveh of song,” through which each woman passes on her way to
freedom (Adelman, Penina, Miriam’s Well, Biblio Press, 1986, p. 71-72). Elat Chayyim, a Jewish
retreat center in Accord, NY, has same-gender group mikveh experiences before Shabbat as part
of their spiritual practice, though they don’t use a traditionally permissible mikveh (sometimes,
they use a hot tub!).
The theology behind these new rituals, like some earlier theologies about mikveh, views the ritual
bath as a way of feeling God’s presence, of celebrating the feminine, or of experiencing a spiritual
rebirth. Some modern writers and poets even describe mikveh as a kind of womb, a returning to
God’s cosmic amniotic fluid. Ruth Finer Mintz, an Israeli poet, writes to God: “We return past the
cup of salt and sorrow, to You, who are wine and water,” evoking both the color of menstrual
blood and the flowing clarity of the mikveh (”Kiddush Levana,” in Women Speak to God: The
Prayers and Poems of Jewish Women, ed. Marcia Cohn Spiegel and Deborah Lipton Kremsdorf,
Woman’s Institute for Continuing Jewish Education, 1987). A modern immersion ceremony for
brides uses an ancient biblical image in which God is a mikveh: “May the God who is mikveh
Yisrael (the mikveh of Israel…be with you now and always” (”A Bridal mikveh Ceremony,” by
Barbara Rossman Penzener and Amy Zwiback-Levenson, in Diamant, The New Jewish Wedding,
p. 157-158).