by A. Fox
In my parents’ home back in St. Paul, Minnesota, I used to tiptoe into the bathroom late at night, lock the door behind me, put a towel in the door’s crack and turn off the lights.
I knew how many steps it took to reach the faucet. How many inches to lift my hand for the shower knob. Slithering to the floor, I’d count the seconds until the tub filled to the sound of the falling water.
I remember the cold floor tiles against my back. I remember the bright ghost light from minutes prior behind my eyelids. The moving water offered me a moment of internal quiet. I relished the enclosure of the bathroom: a vessel for calm.
It was there I could strip my body bare. I would pull the lint from between my toes after 12 hours in wool socks. I would bite my fingernails short. And I’d submerge in the darkness. One. Two. Three times. And finally, exhale. This was my daily ritual.
I didn’t realize how Jewish all this was until my visit to Mayyim Hayyim for an educational program as a part of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute internship. As a person who grew up in a Conservative Jewish synagogue, one might have thought I’d have drawn this parallel earlier.
When I stepped through the door of Mayyim Hayyim, away from the sound of the trickling rainwater running along the base of the building, the word niddah (monthly immersion) slithered through my brain. My heart sank. Genderrrr, I thought to myself…how could I forget? The mikveh is yet another place that cements gender divisions.
As a trans/gender non-conforming Ashkenazi Jew, I’m accustomed to this sinking feeling in the Jewish spaces I navigate. So much of the Ashkenazi Jewishness I experienced growing up was predicated upon gender duality, after all. The effect is not a welcoming one.
Once I was actually inside Mayyim Hayyim I was immediately struck by the remarkable effect of entering a Jewish institution that was explicitly designed for accessibility and pluralistic practice. To my surprise, the sinking feeling gradually went away. I looked around and I didn’t see explicitly gendered decorations. In our introductions we were prompted for our names and pronouns, and Leeza showed us Immersion Ceremonies for coming out, publicly celebrating one’s gender/s rather than the gender assigned at birth, and rituals for before surgery. When we learned about the process of immersion itself, we enacted a pretend coming out ritual and I cried. I was able to imagine myself centered—not merely tolerated–in a collective Jewish space in a powerful way.
Mayyim Hayyim reminded me that I don’t need the blanket of the darkness or a locked bathroom in the middle of the night to find renewal through water. And though I haven’t yet “officially” immersed in the mikveh, I’m looking forward to doing so with a mikveh guide and the lights turned on.
A. Fox is a fourth year undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As a summer intern at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, they are compiling a zine on LGBTQIA+ reclamation of the mikveh. Please send questions and submissions to afox1@ucsc.edu.
Pam McArthur
Thank you, A. Fox, for a beautiful and moving piece about your first experience at Mayyim Chayyim — it is truly a sacred space and its waters are waters of wholeness and well-being. And thank you (once again!) to all the wonderful people who have created and support Mayyim Chayyim as such a welcoming, healing place!
MsShona
I am glad that the author has made progress along a path that is a comfortable spot for them in Jewish observance. The article effectively, and delicately revealed this progress in a fantastic manner. But the final paragraph just killed it all for me. In regards to more traditional mikvah observance, there is a reason for that “blanket of the darkness” and “locked bathroom in the middle of the night”. In traditional Judaism, where there is a distinct line drawn between the sexes, the Jewish women who embrace this type of Judaism put a prime importance on modesty and privacy. Immersing in the mikveh is a private, family matter. The bathrooms are locked due to safety and modesty concerns (as has been demonstrated as needed by the actions of a certain individual with the initials ‘B.F.’).
I am not passing judgement on the author. I am not saying that one form of observance is right, and the other is not. However respect goes both ways. Just because the style of a particular form of Jewish ritual is not for you, that does not make it wrong, and that does not give you the right to position it in a position where it needs to be improved upon. I know that this was not said explicitly. However that is the impression that I got implicitly. My guess is that others may feel that way as well; including some women who struggle with the choice of whether or not to take on the mitzvah of traditional taharat hamishpacha (regular visits to the mikvah) for themselves.