“There’s a real issue around our modern-day understanding of the term purity,” Rabbi Miriam tells me when we meet that sunny morning. “I think it’s hard to break away from the association of things being pure and impure and that association with being clean or dirty, especially when the ritual involves water – but I prefer to view the mikveh ritual as a way to mark the transition between states of being.”
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We’re sitting on a bench in a quiet meadow within the gates of Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, a verdant tree-rimmed sanctuary situated in a leafy corner of Hampstead Heath. With Rabbi Miriam’s plans for a holistic healing centre – which will feature indoor and outdoor mikveh baths – still in the works, the swimming ponds at Hampstead Heath are her unorthodox alternative.
And for the purists among you, maybe stop reading, because what follows will almost certainly annoy you. For one thing, the full nudity prescribed by the traditional mikveh is not possible at Kenwood Ladies’ Pond (though that message seems to have eluded the old women sunbathing in the adjacent field). And while the ritual traditionally dictates that you fully immerse yourself underwater three times, the proliferation of sea-green algae in Hampstead Pond says otherwise.
Considering my reluctance to acquire a bacterial infection, Rabbi Miriam says I only need to immerse up to my neck, and only once. But her spin on the ritual is not all omissions; she adds something, too. Prior to the plunge, we take some time to discuss my upcoming milestone and what it means for me as a woman to transition from being single to married.
“Mikveh is all about recognising those transitions,” she says. “Life is full of those transitions, if we allow ourselves to think of them as such.”
It’s a pertinent point for me; as much as everyone keeps telling me what a big deal it is to get married, I can’t seem to visualise how it will impact my day-to-day life. My partner and I already live together, and over the past five years we’ve spent holidays with one another’s families and been there for each other through loss, illness, joy and celebration. Isn’t that what married couples do anyway? How big a difference can a perfunctory legal ceremony really make?
But maybe we don’t realise just how much life has changed until long after the actual moment of transition has passed us by. And for Rabbi Miriam, the mikveh ritual offers a private, contemplative moment to pause at the point of inflection, to ask yourself: what are you feeling right now? What do you want to leave behind? And what are your hopes for the future?
I feel strangely nervous when we approach the pond. Though I’ve taken the odd plunge in the frigid water off the west coast of Ireland and in the perpetually glacial waters of Lake Michigan, on which my home city of Chicago sits, those occasions were not charged with ceremonial significance. Nor were those bodies of water quite so...unclear. But, persuading myself to be a Big Strong Girl and not my default squeamish hypochondriac, I walk, barefooted, to the edge of the water, which is burnished to a dark gleam in the morning sun.
My bare feet descend one rung into the murky blackness, and then, before allowing myself to register the shocking cold at my ankles, I leap in
Rabbi Miriam leads me in reciting a quick-whispered prayer – Baruch atah Ado-nai, Elo-heinu melech ha’olam, asher kideshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu al ha’tevillah – before, with a reassuring nod towards the water, she stands back.
“Immersion in water softens our form, making us malleable, dissolving some of the rigidity of who we are,” Rabbi Miriam had read aloud to me back in the meadow, an incantation of “kavanah” or “intention” for the ritual ahead. “This allows us to decide who we wish to be when we come out of the water; the water changes us neither by washing away something, nor by letting something soak into us, but simply by softening us so that we can choose to remould ourselves in a different image.”
My feet descend one rung into the murky blackness, and then, before allowing myself to register the shocking cold at my ankles, I leap in. Is there any other way to do such a thing? To feel the uncertainty, but do it anyway?
Afterwards, Rabbi Miriam joins me in saying the shehecheyanu, a prayer for celebrating special occasions, when I emerge dripping from the pond. Then she congratulates me, and the ritual is done – I’ve been mikveh-ed.
The sun kisses my goose-prickled skin, promising a beautiful afternoon, and a swelling sense of benevolence opens in my chest. Though I still don’t know how marriage will change my life, I find myself overcome by all the joyous possibilities.
I think about how I’ll tell my soon-to-be-husband this story, how he’ll tease me for my trepidation, how we’ll recount it for our parents next week.
Next week. I’m getting married next week, I think to myself, and I smile.
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