Dear Readers,
We’re celebrating the end of the secular year with a salute to the blog posts you loved the most in 2014. The data is in; these stories are the ones you voted for with your mouse. Follow below to your heart’s content.
A happy and healthy new year to you and the ones you love.
~Mayyim Hayyim
by Rachel Hillman
Hineni, I said aloud. Here I am, marking today as a transition point from one part of my life to another. I removed my nail polish, which covered the discoloration due to chemotherapy on my once-beautiful (and soon-to-be-beautiful-again) nail beds.
The Shave for the Brave: Getting Ready at the Mikveh
by Rabbi Emma Gottlieb
It started with vanity. My friends and heads and I didn’t think I could do it. I am told my hair is one of my best (physical) features. I couldn’t imagine being without it. I still can’t, to be honest, but in a matter of weeks I won’t have to imagine it. Because I’m doing it – The Shave for the Brave. Because I couldn’t sit comfortably with my vanity; because there are children dying of cancer; because there are so many awful things that happen in the world that we can’t do anything about BUT THIS ISN’T ONE OF THEM.
by Cindy Kalish
It is hard to believe that it has been 10 years. A decade since marriage between two people of the same gender became legal in Massachusetts. It is also a decade since I immersed in a mikveh for the first time.
by Shira M. Cohen-Goldberg
You have to start somewhere. Everybody starts somewhere. But my little one started and never got there. Now I am here, crying inside.
by DeDe Jacobs-Komisar, Development Manager
I’m going to be honest – before I found this place I was totally ambivalent about the mikveh. Growing up Orthodox, we teenage girls were taught to venerate the mikveh as a mysterious, holy, beautiful thing.
We toured mikva’ot on school and camp field trips, where mikveh ladies would show us how gorgeous the rooms were, how intimate and spa-like the experience. That we would immerse monthly, for niddah, after marriage, was a foregone conclusion that did not even require discussion.