2014 Best of the Blog

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


Here I Am

by Rachel Hillman

HillmanPhoto3Hineni, 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

Emma GottliebIt 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.


A Kosher Lesbian Jew

by Cindy Kalish

Cindy KalishIt 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.


You Have to Start Somewhere

by Shira M. Cohen-Goldberg

Shira Cohen-GoldbergYou have to start somewhere. Everybody starts somewhere. But my little one started and never got there. Now I am here, crying inside.

 


The Mikveh, Lady

by DeDe Jacobs-Komisar, Development Manager 

DeDe_Jacobs-Komisar_pic_1_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.

 

Search

  • Mayyim Hayyim currently has limited availability for immersions while we undergo construction to repair damage incurred to the building following the extreme cold on February 4. We will be updating this page periodically with new information. To support our repairs, click here to donate.