A Sinner in the Mikveh

I was about to be married, a thing I had never imagined possible. Why conjure unlikely scenarios when I could conjure a likely one? Instead, I had imagined persuading a future lover not to marry but to make me a child. I would win his consent by promising him exemption from all responsibility. It was a sort of hopeful daydream born of cynicism. A way of making the best of things. Because marriage had not worked for my mother, I had no business believing it might work for me. How could I be destined for anything but loneliness when what distinguished her from me was her optimism? She had expected it to last. Raised in the shadow of her disappointment, I was let loose in the world armed with the knowledge that nothing is guaranteed, a hard-won cliché that I adopted as my own like a cherished foundling.

At twenty-eight years old I wore a perfect, solitaire diamond that I disliked for its prissiness. I had chosen it to convince myself that something conventionally good could happen to me. In a case of shiny gems, I had recognized it as the one from the myth. It caught the sun, producing patterns of refracted light wherever I pointed it.

After the slew of partners with whom there had been no chance of understanding, my fiancé had preternatural intuition. Having lived in the same places and having read the same books, he knew precisely what I meant when I said, “hmmm,” staring into space. So I had reason to believe marriage possible in spite of the skepticism I’d spent so many years honing with theoretical weaponry. But our harmony was not enough to still the fear in me that something would happen to ruin it all. I became insanely jealous of his past, jealous, not of anything he might do, but of something he couldn’t deny. In fact, it was my own past I was trying to exorcize and suddenly, in the midst of researching wedding ceremonies, I knew how to accomplish it.

I would go the the mikveh, the ritual bath where Jewish brides prepare themselves for marriage. As the product of a secular upbringing, I had no familiarity with this practice of purification, but had always assumed it was rooted in misogynist principles, in a disgust with female bodily functions. I would have been repelled by the very thought if I hadn’t a pressing reason to appropriate the mikveh, cleansing my own history of its sordid and disappointing relationships, of having most loved the ones who were able to appreciate me least, of having witnessed too many failed or compromised marriages.

My sudden and surprising interest in the mikveh came from marrying an older man who had also had a string of sordid, disappointing relationships, and who—even worse—had had happy ones. It came from the difficulty of believing that it would be possible to commit to a future with someone whose intentions, whose affections, respect and desire I could trust. I needed the mikveh for the same reasons I needed to get married, to differentiate this most beautiful and promising relationship from all the others that had come before.

“Does the tradition teach that women’s bodies are dirty?” I asked. She shook her head sadly. “If the point of the mikveh were to cleanse the body,” she asked, “why would we have to bathe before the bath?” She went on to explain that the mikveh personifies both womb and grave. “Impurity” designates no more than the absence of life while “purity” designates life’s potential. By immersing oneself into water from a natural source, a woman humbles herself, submitting to a transformation, signaling a change in her status, and marking the moment when life’s potential is restored.

That all sounded perfect. Transformation was what I was after. This was an act of separation, or havdalah, which creates a distinction between the holy and the mundane. Who knew that the tradition I was born into would supply me with a perfect symbolic system? My marriage would be holy. All that came before would be retrospectively erased. But for a single problem, discovered at the conclusion of our talk, it could not have been more perfect.

What constitutes a trace? Is it not, by definition, something barely discernible, which is to say, not discernible to all? Is it not a sign that could be read in this way or that? Is a trace not evidence of former existence? And if it is only a vestige of something that is no more, is it evidence at all? Was Judaism itself not a religion of multiple interpretations, of proliferating commentaries, of endless debate?

Could I bear to betray her? What would be the consequences if I did betray both this kind woman and the rabbi who had tried so hard to accommodate me? Would improper use of the mikveh cause a spiritual contamination? Were there writings on the subject? Would the tradition anticipate that there would be a woman who would want to participate so badly that she was willing to ruin the very thing she was seeking?

The water was warm and inviting. I submerged myself three times. I said the prayers. I prayed to rid myself of our pasts, to clear space for our futures. I bathed in holy waters, sinning in the very moment of my purification.