Plunging Into Adulthood

by Elicia Brown
Special To The Jewish Week

With eyes wide open, Avital Hamilton, 12, plunged into the sacred waters of mikveh. Below the surface, she wondered and she worried. She thought about how the ritual pool held her like a womb, and she thought about growing up, about the next day when she would chant Torah in front of 800 congregants. Then Avital recited a blessing, immersed herself twice more — and flipped into a handstand.
When she emerged from the ritual bath, a sense of serenity settled over her. “I was very calm the rest of the day,” says Avital. “I really can’t wait to go back for the next special occasion.”
Such are the powers of the pre-bat mitzvah dunk.
In a still small but growing trend,

adolescents have begun quietly entering the warm waters of the ritual bath a day or so before they take the public plunge into Jewish adulthood. To date, this new wave of ritual immersions hasn’t exactly engulfed American Jewry. But organizers of a new pilot project, “Beneath The Surface” — run by Mayyim Hayyim, a Boston-based mikveh and education center; and funded by the Hadassah Foundation — hope to stir up interest in this practice, which has so much allure that one boy compared his pre-bar mitzvah submersion to landing in Israel for the first time.
Mikveh, adherents say, can strengthen the identity of young liberal Jews, at a time when close to half discontinue Jewish education after their bat or bar mitzvah.
One bat mitzvah girl who took the plunge writes that she was utterly unenthusiastic — at first. But, “the water turned and swam around me, embracing me into its loving arms. When I was about to make my last immersion I prayed for my loved ones, with the living water seeping into my bones, skin and heart.”
The ritual bath can “open a relationship with God. That’s hard to measure, hard to teach,” says Aliza Kline, executive director of Mayyim Hayyim, which was founded in 2004 by the author Anita Diamant, and has been serving as a paradigm for modern liberal mikvehs. Kline hopes that news of the rite’s powers will travel quickly through the growing network of 20 or so community mikvehs around the country, which typically welcome immersions of all kinds.
Kline also points out that a pre-b’nai mitzvah dunk offers another important benefit for adolescents reared as Jews but without a Jewish mother. In a ritual that often provokes anger and shame, Conservative rabbis typically bring such children to the mikveh before their bar or bat mitzvah to undergo a formal conversion. If the passage to Jewish adulthood typically included a stop at the mikveh, it would obviate the need for singling out a few kids for an awkward event.
Some traditional Jews might feel uneasy — or even a bit queasy — when they learn about a new pilot project which will study and promote the connection between mikveh and bat mitzvah. After all, according to Jewish law, one of the mikveh’s central roles is to sanctify the sex of a married couple.
Rivkah Slonim, author of “Total Immersion,” a popular collection of essays on mikveh, herself a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch chasidic sect, says that while no one could frame it as a transgression, she doesn’t support adolescent girls dipping into the sacred waters of mikveh.
Instead, she would encourage a guided tour, which could demystify how mikveh is used within a marriage. Slonim is concerned that a submersion might “trivialize what the Torah mandates for married women.” With this modern rite, she worries, the mikveh “will be divorced, divested and denuded of its original intent.”
On the other hand, Rabbi Susan Grossman, who wrote a responsa (rabbinic opinion) on mikveh for the Conservative movement, e-mails that she’s never heard of the b’nai mitzvah practice. But “if it is being used in a pietistic way to raise spiritual appreciation for the event and pray for God’s blessings, then there is ample precedent for such mikveh use for both men and women.”
For at least one bar mitzvah boy, that “spiritual appreciation” was overpowering, crashing over him like a tidal wave. Ben Chartook writes: “As I emerged from the mikveh, I felt that I was affirming my place among the Jewish people. I climbed up the steps and really felt what it meant to say, ‘Hineni, here I am, ready for the Shabbat and bar mitzvah ahead. Hineni, here I am, ready to accept responsibility, to play my role, to be counted.’ ”
Elicia Brown’s column appears the second week of the month.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization