This post is part of Jewish Wedding Network’s ongoing series documenting a bride’s experience visiting the mikvah before her wedding day. Mayim Bialik previously blogged about her Jewish wedding and now she shares her mikvah story:

I am a good student. I know that sounds like I am bragging; but I’m not. I am just being honest. My parents are both teachers and I was raised with an immigrant philosophy: study hard and succeed. So when I planned to “study” with a bride teacher before my wedding in 2003, I decided I was going to be a good student. No matter what.

I approached this study sort of anthropologically: What have thousands of years of Jewish history been teaching women about being a “good wife?” What does that mean to me now? Will this tarnish my feminist sensibilities beyond repair?

I studied for several months (nearly half of our engagement!) with an excellent and very hip modern Orthodox woman, herself the wife of a Rabbi, a licensed therapist, and mother to 3 beaming and brilliant daughters. I mostly learned the rules of Niddah, which was daunting and kind of intimidating. The customs of not touching one’s husband for almost half of every month seemed, frankly, archaic and outdated. I was not at all sure if I even wanted to pursue this line of exploration. Not for me; no thank you.

However… what intrigued me was the ritualistic act of engagement which has been set apart as sacred by our people for thousands of years: mikveh. Let me get this straight, I thought: assuming you have no ‘relations’ while you have your menstrual cycle, and assuming you then ‘count for yourself’ 7 days after that (oy, the math!), the method of reintroducing yourself to your husband and to your physical sexuality is the mikveh? A simple — but of course, halachically supervised– body of water that requires that you strip yourself down totally lets you be born again on a monthly basis? And this has kept marriages strong for thousands of years? Come on. No way.

I was incredibly skeptical and my husband was not amused at all. He did not want to hear any part of this stuff. This all sounded crazy to us. However, I took a deep breath, put aside my rational secular education and pretended that I was willing to be open. I kept learning and learning. I read Aryeh Kaplan’s Waters of Eden: The Mystery of the Mikveh and I got the chills. The numerical value of water is 40. My name, Mayim, means water. It rained for Noah for 40 days and 40 nights. 40 years in the desert. Moses was up on the mountain for 40 days. Water is transformative. It is an entrance and an exit and a cleansing and a doorway. This was it. I believed in something magical about those waters. Even if I rejected everything else about being a “good wife” the Orthodox way, this water thing? This I could do.

Good student that I was, though, I studied it all very hard. I gave it my all. I practiced the ‘counting’ exercises in my The Secret of Jewish Femininity book. I read of the women of Auschwitz ensuring immersion for women so inclined in the camps. I read of Russian women trudging through the snow for an immersion in a secret dark icy mikveh during the Cold War. I read of the blessings women believed the waters could grant. I scheduled my visit for the night before my wedding and invited my mother (she saw my first “birth” so why not the second!?), my mother-in-law-to be (who seemed to be on a Margaret Mead-type mission on this one), my aunt from Israel who herself had reclaimed the Orthodoxy of my great-grandparents; she was so touched that I asked for the custom of my Hungarian family for immersion and she shared it with me like a long-lost recipe: 1 immersion before the blessing; 2 immersions after.

I immersed slowly and carefully and I prayed for a happy wedding. Lo and behold: it was powerful and cleansing. I felt like a baby swimming in amniotic fluid. I felt new. I felt pure and ready to begin life as a new soul. I felt like a real Jewish bride. It was amazing.

The path of our marriage has actually taken me through numerous visits to the mikveh with all sorts of emotions: joy, intimidation, respite, and sometimes annoyance (like the night my mikveh date fell on a shabbat evening and i walked in the darkness for an hour to the closest mikveh); but always there is that moment of quiet when I am under the waters when nothing can touch me. There is no sound; there is no fear; there is no room for doubt. I am immersed truly and completely. My husband, first so skeptical and wary of this commitment, now sees the value of this mitzvah and how it affects me and us.

When my husband and I wanted to conceive, the mikveh took on new power: It was the gateway to our hopes and the reminder that I was desiring to soon not need the mikveh, since during the time that one is pregnant and not cycling, one does not immerse. The mikveh held my prayers when I immersed as an almost full-term pregnant woman (some women immerse for good luck before they enter the 10th month of pregnancy). The waters of the mikveh held my prayers again after I healed from delivery (with our 6 week-old screaming in the car as my husband anxiously waited for my “relaxing” immersion to end before said baby woke the entire neighborhood), and again when I began my cycle again when my just-weaned son was almost 2 years old. The mikveh held my prayers for our second pregnancy, and it held them when I immersed before his delivery and again when I healed. How many prayers are held in those waters? And how many more can it hold?

I miss the waters when I am without them; nursing a child often keeps us away from the ability to cycle and thus immerse, but I still need that cleansing. I miss the preparation; often the only hour I got to myself every month was my mikveh-preparation time. I miss the ritual; the always perfect temperature of the water; the fancy robe and the paper slippers; the sound of the Brooklyn-accented mikveh lady telling me proudly and defiantly that my immersion is “kosher;” I miss the mikveh.

What is my tradition teaching me about the time when I am without the mikveh? Where will my cleansing come from? From all that I have learned, there are reasons for these things; it is for me to draw them out of the water, as it were. I guess I need to study some more to find out. The good student in me needs to rise again.

For now, the mikveh calls to me but it is not time for me yet. Soon. What will I pray for next? For now, I answer the call of the mikveh by sharing my positive story of the cleansing and rebirth I have found in the waters with others. All it takes is an open mind and the desire to feel born again. And again and again.

Photo Credit: Denise Herrick Borchert

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts documenting a bride’s experience visiting the mikvah before her wedding day. Hadassah Sabo-Milner is an observant Jew, and a thirty-something mother of four who writes honestly about her experience of visiting the mikvah before her second trip down the aisle:

The mikvah is a necessary part of a religious married woman’s life. I must admit to loving the whole idea of ritual purification, of being spiritually cleansed so that I can “be” with my spouse on all different levels – physically, emotionally, and spiritually. When I was married the first time I enjoyed taking the time to prepare for immersion, not just physically, but mentally. I also enjoyed the “me time” I was able to snag that one night a month––to go to the mikvah and prepare there without any of my kids banging on the bathroom door.

Now that I have returned to the state of holy matrimony, it is once again incumbent on me to use the mikvah. I now bring a different mindset to the whole thing. Marriage takes on a different meaning once you have experienced the pain of divorce. Some people never recover enough to be able to trust again; I was so worried that I would be one of them. But once my new husband entered my life, enabling me to once again trust, he inspired me to be both a better person and a better Jewess.

When I prepared for the mikvah before my wedding it was a true celebration – not only was I cleansing my body and soul in preparation for my marriage, but I also was renewing my sacred bond with the One Above, washing away the anguish, the sadness and the raw pain of the years that intervened between my last immersion and this one. I was always taught that the waters of the mikvah aren’t there to wash away dirt–for we are physically clean before we enter it–but that they are there to wash away spiritual impurity.

The water awaited me, its surface like a sheet of ice, belying the warmth in the room. I had spent the last hour in mental and physical preparation for this moment. My face and body were scrubbed clean, my long hair combed and knot free. I was without makeup, and had shed my expensive tailored clothing–my personal truth revealed in my near-nakedness.

I knew that the next day I would bring myself to the chuppah, to pledge my undying love and devotion to the man of my dreams. This step was one of many to be completed before the wedding, but it was the most important one to me.

The attendant handed me a prayer that brides have said since time immemorial. As I recited it, I felt their bond, their sisterhood; I felt their arms around me, their wishes for a life of happiness and joy, love, and laughter.

It was time for me to immerse. The attendant turned away so that I could modestly remove my robe and descend the steps into the sacred waters. I allowed my mind to slip into a contemplative mode, and I felt the cool water lap against my shins as I slowly descended into the depths. Once I was in the water up to my neck the attendant turned to me, keeping her eyes on my face, wanting to spare me any feelings of embarrassment.

She nodded to me, silently communicating that it was time to start the immersion. All that I had learned in my kallah classes came flooding back to me. I briefly panicked that I wouldn’t perform the mitzvah correctly, even though I had performed it so many times before. Calm suddenly descended, and I felt my body suffused with confidence and otherworldly light. My soul, my very old soul that was at Mount Sinai, steered me in the right direction, as it has always done before.

I moved my body forward, diving gracefully into the water. The water rose up to close over my head as I quickly caught my breath. I remembered not to tense my body but to allow every part of me to be caressed by the blessed waters, to allow this water to cleanse and purify my spirit, to ready me for the journey of a thousand lifetimes.

I surfaced and recited the blessing – I heard my sisters around the world answer “Amen.” I immersed two more times, each time feeling layers and layers of doubt and uncertainty lift from me. As I entered into the elevated state of purity, I felt cleansed from my past transgressions and energized to fill the future with everything that is good and just in the world.

I floated out of the ritual bath on the wings of angels who the next day accompanied me to the chuppah, to the start of my new beginning.

Read more of Hadassah Sabo-Milner’s writing at her personal blog In The Pink.

This is the first in an ongoing series on Jewish Wedding Network chronicling a bride’s experience visiting the Mikvah.

The decision to visit the mikvah before my wedding was a no brainer.  I knew that is was not very likely that I would be visiting a mikvah again (or at least on a regular basis as Orthodox Jews do), and I saw it as a once in a lifetime experience that I did not want to pass up.

The issue was that I had high expectations, and I was concerned about being let down. I desperately wanted it to be a spiritual experience, something that would move me in a very profound way.  I had heard good and bad stories about the mikvah – both from those who had highly spiritual experiences to those that had run-ins with the stereotypical “Mikvah Lady.”  I tried my best not to let the horror stories deter me as it had done for so many of my friends.

I laid the foundation for my “good experience” by choosing a new spa-like mikvah on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  The mikvah lady was young and pretty and kind, nothing like the dreaded mikvah ladies you hear all about.

And so the day arrived, and I was left alone standing naked as the mikvah lady inspected my body for dirt and loose hairs before I descended into the mikvah.  I stood there completely uncomfortable, laughing to myself how strange this all was, thinking “This better be worth it.”

I don’t know what it is, but I was always one of those people who could never hold their nose under water.   Yes, I was the kid who always pinched her nose as she did a belly flop, and wore nose clips when I went swimming in the ocean. It always bothered me that I couldn’t just swim underwater like everyone else, but it was something that I could never help.

I took my steps slowly one by one into the mikvah’s waters and when I was centered in the pool, I recited the prayer slowly and with meaning.  Then the mikvah lady gave me the okay to dunk,  and I did, slowly and with purpose, wanting to really take in the experience. As I arose from the waters I heard her say “Not Kosher, do it again, but don’t hold your nose with your hand this time.”   I tried to explain my handicap to her – that I couldn’t hold my nose without pinching it, that it was something that I could just never do. I was hoping that she would make some kind of exception, but she wouldn’t have it. “Try it again without holding your nose,” she said, “It will only be for a second.”

I tried to prevent myself from panicking.  Here I was trying to have a meaningful spiritual once-in-a-lifetime experience and it wasn’t even going to be considered “Kosher” unless I put myself in an even more uncomfortable situation.   I could go under without holding my nose, but I knew that I was going to swallow a bunch of water and gag and….I decided to do it anyway.

I took a deep breath and went under, hands at my sides.
And as I arose from the waters, I realized I was fine.

Twenty-nine years of holding my nose and wearing nose clips, and with just one dunk in the mikvah
I FELT CURED.

I dunked a second and third time. I smiled, knowing that I did have the spiritual experience I was hoping for, although it was completely different from what I had expected.

I learned to swim in the mikvah that day, and I’ve been swimming with my hands by my side ever since.

The above photo was taken on my honeymoon.