{"id":2697,"date":"2014-10-23T12:04:30","date_gmt":"2014-10-23T19:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/?p=2697"},"modified":"2014-10-23T12:04:30","modified_gmt":"2014-10-23T19:04:30","slug":"a-violation-of-the-mikveh-and-the-story-of-a-conversion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/23\/a-violation-of-the-mikveh-and-the-story-of-a-conversion\/","title":{"rendered":"A Violation of the Mikveh and The Story of A Conversion"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Will<\/a>
Will Deutsch, Notes from the Tribe<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Few places are more private, spiritually critical, inspiring and, as Rabbi\u00a0Danya Rutenberg<\/a>\u00a0writes, comforting, than the mikveh. \u00a0Her piece on the unspeakable desecration of that space<\/a> by Washington Rabbi Barry Freundel, who allegedly used hidden cameras to spy on women while they were there, brought me to tears even though I became observant when I was older and the \u00a0mikveh less central than it was for all my younger sisters, who taught me to keep kosher and light candles and honor Shabbat. \u00a0For them it is all so much worse, a kind of collective rape. \u00a0Rutenberg writes:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what percent of the water in the mikveh is actually made up of women\u2019s tears, but I suspect it\u2019s a lot. The mikveh is meant to hold vulnerability. The fact that one is naked when immersing is not just a literal fact \u2014 the symbolism of it penetrates every single pore, every inch of the self that goes under the living waters. It is, for a lot of women, a unique place for a certain kind of stopping, a certain kind of reflection, a certain kind of engaging with the present moment and with God. Not everyone has the same experience, obviously, but the ritual of mikveh opens up a space that can be exquisitely intimate and deeply personal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Six years ago, I wrote about one young woman’s mikveh experience<\/a>; I’m republishing a version of it here as an example of just what has been violated.<\/p>\n

We had a party Saturday.\u00a0 Ice cream cake, fruit, songs and verses.\u00a0 It wasn’t exactly a birthday party, but kind of.\u00a0 It’s very tough to convert to Orthodox Judaism. Rabbis ask you over and over if you’re serious.\u00a0 You have to study.\u00a0 You have to read out loud in Hebrew.\u00a0 You have to answer questions to a board of 3 (male) rabbis.\u00a0 Then, you have to immerse yourself in a \u00a0mikveh<\/a>. It’s the culmination of several years of study and soul-searching.<\/p>\n

So we had a party to celebrate a young woman who had navigated the process and, just this past week, emerged from the waters\u00a0 – Jewish.\u00a0 As she spoke to the assembled women she told us not just about her own journey, but, in a way, about our own.\u00a0 Unable to begin without tears, she decided first to read\u00a0the passage<\/a>\u00a0that seemed to her to describe where she’d been – and where she’s landed.\u00a0 (Another convert friend of mine told me she’s clung to the same verses; they have particular meaning to those who choose<\/em> to become Jewish, to \u00a0“go where we go.”)\u00a0 Standing at one end of the table\u00a0and surrounded by many of the women of our congregation gathered in her\u00a0honor, she began to read from the Book of Ruth.<\/p>\n

Mother-in-law Naomi is\u00a0trying to convince her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth to go back to her own\u00a0nation and not suffer with her.<\/em><\/p>\n

But\u00a0Ruth answers \u201cDon\u2019t ask me to leave you!\u00a0 Let me go with you.\u00a0 Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live,\u00a0I will live.\u00a0 Your people will be my\u00a0people, and your God will be my God.\u00a0 Wherever you die, I will die, and that is\u00a0where I will be buried.\u00a0 May the LORD\u2019s\u00a0worst punishment come upon me if I let anything but death separate me from you!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The story represents much of what she feels about her new life.\u00a0 Her choice: to immerse in the mikveh as one person and emerge as another, committed to the very demanding requirements of conversion and to join the tribe that I was born into and, for much of my life, lived within – accepting my identity as a Jew but very little else.<\/p>\n

In many ways, I have made the same choices she did.\u00a0 Compared to the way I live now, the Judaism I knew then was an\u00a0 identity easily moved aside when inconvenient.\u00a0 Now, after four years of increasingly observant life, my identity is so tangled with my Judaism that there’s no way to pretend it isn’t there, isn’t affecting all I see and every choice I make.\u00a0 They call it “the yoke of heaven” — acceptance of the rules handed down so long ago.\u00a0 It looks so weird from the outside, so whether you’re my young friend choosing to become a Jew, or me, choosing to actually live like one, you’re somewhat set apart by your decisions.\u00a0 Keep kosher – you can’t eat in most restaurants or even at your old friends’ homes.\u00a0 Observe the Sabbath, you can’t go see\u00a0Great Big Sea<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Bruce Springsteen<\/a>\u00a0or to a good friend’s 40th birthday party because they’re on a Friday night.\u00a0 Honor the holidays and you may antagonize clients and risk losing business.\u00a0 And sometimes, friends, and even family, look askance, withdraw or just shake their heads.<\/p>\n

Even so, what my friend has chosen — what my husband and I have chosen — what the community of friends we love has chosen – is a life rife with meaning and commitment, with tangible goals to be better, more honorable, more committed beings with an informing value system and sense of purpose. After a lifetime that was pretty successful and often seemed glamorous and highly visible, this is a choice of which I am very proud.\u00a0 Different from before, but at least as demanding intellectually, ethically and emotionally as any other stop on my life’s journey.\u00a0 In many ways, it has allowed me to rediscover the person I used to think I was, and liked – as a writer, a thinker, a wife and mother and friend.\u00a0 \u00a0 I am grateful that I have found it, and so very glad that this generous and articulate young woman reminded me, through the moving and exquisite reflections on her own choice, just why I made mine.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few places are more private, spiritually critical, inspiring and, as Rabbi\u00a0Danya Rutenberg\u00a0writes, comforting, than the mikveh. \u00a0Her piece on the unspeakable desecration of that space by Washington Rabbi Barry Freundel, who allegedly used hidden cameras to spy on women while they were there, brought me to tears even though I became observant when I was … Continue reading A Violation of the Mikveh and The Story of A Conversion<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,27,7,98,1,29],"tags":[1626,1624,1623,2925,1622,2928,2926,2923,220,219,2931,2920,2924,2929,2930,2927,2922,221,1740,2921],"class_list":["post-2697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-current-affairs","category-life","category-religion","category-uncategorized","category-women","tag-being-a-convert","tag-book-of-ruth","tag-conversion","tag-conversion-in-the-mikveh","tag-convert","tag-convert-to-judaism","tag-danya-rutenberg","tag-freundel","tag-jewish","tag-judaism","tag-living-waters","tag-mikveh","tag-mikveh-and-conversion","tag-mikveh-and-loss","tag-mikveh-and-love","tag-mikveh-scandal","tag-peeping","tag-religion-2","tag-religion-and-gender","tag-sacredness-of-mikveh"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-Hv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2697"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2702,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2697\/revisions\/2702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}