Technion and Haifa U. Students’ Mikvah Tour
It was a rainy Thursday afternoon when we set out. Tova Levine from JLIC Technion and Haifa U. brought five students who’d never stepped inside a mikvah building before. One from the UK, one from Brazil, one from India, one from South Africa, and one from the USA. All here to learn about this holy, important, and sometimes mysterious mitzvah. The rain felt ironic, funny, and a siman bracha as we laughed and commented about how the original mitzvah involving water in Judaism is in the Mikvah!
We spoke about how the first mikveh mayim (gathering of waters) was created by Hashem on the third day of Creation as He separated the waters from the dry land in order to create the oceans and bodies of water. We related that the word מים with the letter מ whose numerical value is 40 is the letter of change and transition and how we use the mikvah in three main scenarios in Judaism to change someone or something’s status. The first is a vessel that needs to be toveled, the second is a convert who transitions from being a non-Jew to being Jewish, and the third is a woman after her menstrual cycle and waiting 7 days.
Rachel, a sweet Israeli woman, let us into the mikvah building in the neighboring community of Neve She’anan and showed us around the mikvah. The preparation rooms were very clean and white. There was a special one for a kallah (bride) that has its own little mikvah inside of it. The preparation rooms all connect through a back door to the main mikvah, which had beautiful blue tiles. Rachel spoke in Hebrew and Tova translated, with the help of the students who are more fluent in Hebrew. She showed us how the chlorinated waters kiss the rainwater cistern, which is located underneath. She explained how biological research shows that women who keep the laws of taharat mishpacha (family purity) are keeping away infection and other diseases.
But most importantly she quoted to us from her handwritten papers that not only have the Jewish women kept the family purity laws, but the family purity laws have kept the Jewish women and families over the generations. The challenge of educating about mikvah is that it is usually a secret society that one gets inducted into once one is married and only starts learning about when doing kallah classes.
When I was a young student studying in Jerusalem at Hebrew University, an organized mikvah tour gave me my first glimpse inside one. I’d gone to Jewish day school my whole life. I wanted to give our students at Technion and Haifa U. that same opportunity. Some of the girls on this tour also had years of Jewish education but had never stepped into a mikvah building until now. Others are just learning about taharat hamishpacha for the first time. They all walked out that afternoon knowing a little more about a mitzvah that’s been kept quietly, faithfully, for generations. And now they’re part of that story too.
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