The Weather Outside

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by DeDe Jacobs-Komisar, Development Manager Living in the Boston area, it’s hard to think about anything these days besides snow. It’s hard to believe that just twenty days ago it had only snowed five inches the entire season; now we’re buried in a collective snowfall of more than six feet that has wreaked havoc on all […]

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Endings and Beginnings

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by Pamela Cole My first visit to Mayyim Hayyim was a beautiful May evening in 2014. I was on a ‘field trip’ with my Pathways to Judaism class and we were being introduced to what would mark the final step of our conversion process. It wasn’t the first time I had heard of Mayyim Hayyim, though. […]

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How a Trip to the Mikveh Helped Me Face My Pregnancy Fears

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by Tamara Reese  This article originally appeared on kveller.com I had hoped for a mikveh immersion at the end of my first pregnancy. I wanted the ritual waters to embrace me as a soon-to-be mother as openly as they had to Judaism and to marriage. I had dreamed of how I wanted every aspect of […]

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No Longer on the Outside

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by Andie Insoft, Mikveh Guide  Just a “few” years ago, when I was a teenager, if someone had told me that I would someday be a mikveh guide, I would have said they were absolutely crazy.  I grew up in a fairly traditional, Conservative, Jewish home.  We kept kosher, attended services (at least 3 times […]

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There Must be Something in the Water

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by Carrie Bornstein Last week I had the fortune of teaching a group of undergrads at Harvard Hillel and we spent some time looking at texts on the power of water. In addition to the waters of creation when God separated the heaven from the waters of the earth, we also explored waters of destruction […]

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A Place for Everything

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by Rabbi Jenny Solomon Where is your “happy place?”  Some people picture themselves on a sunlit beach.  Others have a favorite niche in their homes.  Still others conjure up a vacation destination that holds warm memories and sacred traditions.  But what if your “happy place” was also your “sad place,”  your “worried place,”  your “gratitude […]

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Rules and Engagement

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by Walt Clark, Office Assistant I remember a few years ago, a friend of mine signed up to be a Couchsurfing host. Couchsurfing.com is a website where people offer up their homes to travelers. Over the course of that summer I got talk to a lot people from all corners of the globe. One evening, I was barbecuing […]

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Finding Myself in Living Waters

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by Rabbi Jaclyn Cohen I first breathed the words “mikveh,” “maybe,” and “going to” my third year of rabbinical school at HUC-JIR, the Reform Movement’s seminary. Well-intentioned classmates and friends – whom I admire and adore – were surprised. Some were skeptical. Their reactions were likely born from the same source as my own misgivings about mikveh: […]

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Under Construction

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by DeDe Jacobs-Komisar, Development Manager Things were kind of noisy during the past few weeks here at Mayyim Hayyim. We brought in contractors to redo all of the floor tiling on the wet side downstairs. When Mayyim Hayyim was originally built about a decade ago, the design included lovely, big squares of wood paneling amidst […]

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2014 Best of the Blog

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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 […]

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Talking in the Dark… and the Light

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by Lisa Berman, Mikveh and Education Director It’s dark out. Cold. Inside the car we are warm and cozy, zooming along the highway. The heater vents whoosh warm air, creating a soothing white noise. My daughter sits in the passenger seat, eating her dinner from a divided plastic container – cut up chicken in one […]

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Bounty and Despair: Hoshiah na

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by Shira M. Cohen-Goldberg This has been a hard year. At this time last year my heart was a well of despair. Some of you may have read about how I emerged from having a miscarriage at 12 weeks gestation last year on this blog. Writing that post was extremely healing for me. Many of you reached […]

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