Shira, who was in her late twenties when we spoke, described herself as usually confident and outspoken. However, as she stood draped only in a towel at the edge of the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath, she did not feel “so self-possessed.” Shira was relatively new to the mikveh, which she had attended for the first time before her recent wedding and returned to each of the last few months as part of her observance of the laws of family purity (taharat hamishpaḥa), a system that is designed for cis-heterosexual marriage and encourages procreative sex. According to Jewish law (halakha), uterine blood renders a woman niddah, which literally means separation, because a husband and wife cannot engage in sexual intimacy until the menstruant immerses in the mikveh. The ritual bath facilitates her transition from tameh to tahor, often translated as impure to pure. Monthly, she symbolically re-enters a watery womb and emerges ready for the possibility of carrying new life.
Under the cover of evening’s darkness, when the mikveh opened so women could immerse with an added layer of modesty, Shira walked the several blocks from her Brooklyn apartment and then completed her preparations for immersion, removing any barriers—whether stray hairs or nail polish—that could stand between the human body and the mikveh’s waters. When Shira descended the steps down into the belly of the mikveh and submerged her body, her long, flowing hair swirled around in the water. Like most Ashkenazi women, Shira’s minhag (custom) was three immersions. The mikveh attendant, however, continued to discount her immersions for this or that reason, instructing her to immerse over and over again. Shira recounted:
And then, this just sounds so funny, one time she told me . . .that my eyes were shut too tightly so I need to relax more. Which is absurd, I was so tense because I was on my fifth or sixth dunk, and also there’s literally a line in the Rambam [the Hebrew acronym for Maimonides], like a direct quote from the Rambam, ‘Who’s to say that her eyes are shut too tightly.’ He says you don’t care how tightly a woman’s eyes are shut! . . . It was crazy. And I just felt so stuck. I was naked. I couldn’t be like ‘I think I’ll finish and get out of the water.’ I had water up my nose, I felt like I was drowning. It was very, very upsetting.
The authoritative voice of the Rambam, which Shira knew, couldn’t speak up from the medieval page to help her. The text didn’t really matter now: Water was up Shira’s nose. It had penetrated her body. She felt like she was drowning. “It was very much clear that she had her idea of what halakha was and she needed to make sure it was followed for herself . . . [She] did not care about me as a human being,” Shira reflected as she unpacked her experience of alienation. Shira’s clarity begged the question for me: Whose ritual was this?
My book Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion immerses its readers in stories like Shira’s to examine what reproductive processes reveal about religious and political life. Processes of creating and maintaining life, or rather lives, following the Hebrew’s always plural noun ḥayyim, are not, as a dominant Western imagination suggests, the work of atomized and autonomous individuals. To know this, all we need to do is follow the water—or rather, waters, mayyim—that interpermeates us as it cycles and changes form, connecting across space and time. In the Torah, mayyim ḥayyim is fresh water that flows on and through the earth that is put to use as a ritual tool for purification (for example, in Leviticus 14:5-6; 50-52). These waters hold thousands of years of stories about human life, having held human bodies through some of their most vulnerable moments, binding them to the collective past, present, and future.
Like many other mobile, collective living bodies, water is, to quote Cecilia Chen, a “responsive and promiscuous solvent.” She continues, “Water is rarely pure and is always picking up, carrying along, dropping off, and bonding with other elements. In this sense, it materially communicates where it has been, what has occurred elsewhere, and even what is possible.” In Gestating Judaism, I attempt to tell stories of contemporary religious life that listen to the political lessons water whispers and shouts, to learn from its Torah: its accumulated wisdom. I have gathered some of the lessons of Judaism’s living waters to craft an innovative methodology I call ethnodrashy, the bonding together of the rabbinic exegetical technique of midrash with the social scientific method of ethnography, combining their lessons to tell stories about contemporary religion and politics.
Akin to critical, self-reflexive ethnographies, ethnodrashy acknowledges that it, too, “actively bring[s] cues to bear on the text.” Where the ethnographic and midrashic projects usually part ways, however, is in questions of faithfulness: the critical ethnographic project attends to what might be called authorial intent, or the subjects’ self-understanding, while midrash, in the words of David Weiss Halivni, “indulge[s] in imaginative comments” based on “cues [that] come from outside.” Midrash has a dual purpose: exegesis to explicate a text and a creative reimagining of that text to maintain its relevance. Torah demands that the people who hold fast to it keep it alive. Midrash is a way to make Torah live through its writers.
I am not the only one making use of mayyim ḥayyim to reinvent traditions to fit contemporary needs. Since the 1970s, Jewish feminists have debated whether immersion in rivers and streams, or in engineered ritual baths called mikvehs, could be made into potent spiritual tools for marking life transitions, or whether a ritual that had come to be disproportionately associated with menstrual purity was irredeemably misogynistic. By the turn of the twenty-first century, local community mikveh projects have been popping up across U.S. cities, beginning with Mayyim Hayyim in Newton, MA, which began teaching about and facilitating mikveh ceremonies for healing, coming out, or celebrating a bat mitzvah.
Feminist interventions are also reshaping traditional mikveh rituals, including the expectations of women like Shira. Shira had been raised in Orthodox circles in the 1990s and early 2000s that were committed to formulating more inclusive forms of observant Judaism. Shira’s sensibilities had been shaped by highly educated women who had been stripping away the layers of authority that stand between a woman and her fulfillment of her ritual obligations. She wanted to do mikveh on her own terms, as an agent choosing how to perform her ritual obligations.
Yet, mikveh is not solely or simply an individual human enterprise, and its significance exceeds the manipulation of socially constructed symbols of religious purity or biological facts about female reproductive potential. Feminist mikveh movements claim religious and political agency, but, fundamentally, mikveh is a religious technology that enacts a “small death”: in order to be reborn, you enter a pool with thousands of years of rabbinic men’s say-so and, however temporarily, stop breathing.
I am not suggesting that mikveh experiences should be traumatic. Nor do I mean to suggest that all or most mikveh experiences feel like trial by water or that most mikveh attendants act this way. In fact, most attendants that oversee ritual immersions are committed to creating meaningful or at least safe experiences. But the figure of the “mikveh lady” has built up a damning reputation. Anita Diamant, known for her bestseller The Red Tent and who also founded Mayyim Hayyim, described the mikveh lady as “a nearly mythic creature believed to be descended from the dragon,” a reflection of her anger at her experiences and perceptions of patriarchal Orthodox hegemony that disenfranchised women and non-Orthodox Jews for a variety of reasons, from uncut cuticles to sexual orientation.
Reading Diamant’s critique sparks an image for me that casts light on the politics of the mikveh. I open a browser window to re-examine that famous frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, the seventeenth century political treatise that proposes—and here I am greatly simplifying—authoritarian sovereignty as the solution to social disorder. The Latin translation of Job 41:24 appears atop Abraham Bosse’s engraving of a sovereign, crowned head lording over a composite collective body, keeping the state of nature at bay with military and ecclesiastical power symbolized by sword and crosier, a pastoral staff.
That frontispiece of Leviathan could be a mean stand-in for Shira’s dragon lady in those moments when the caricature of power seems fitting. The billowing hair—a sheitel (wig)?—sits under a crown, though in less official moments she might wear a snood, which was, fittingly, a noblewoman’s headwear in early modern Europe. Clutching her nail scissors as sword and Moses’s staff in place of sovereign’s crosier —a symbol of her authority as the deputy of rabbis who have inherited the laws from Moses—she stands at the ready to hold up your towel in her cinched fingers.
Let me be clear: there is no Leviathan in the mikveh. Heaven forbid. Indeed, this seems like a very unappealing idea, especially for modern American women steeped in a culture of democracy, celebrating hard-won bodily autonomy and agency afforded some twenty-first-century women. Outside the frame of God’s commands and the mutual commitment that entails, it feels almost impossible to imagine: Why would a woman subject herself to halakhic biopower when the state already encroaches on reproductive rights?
We live in an unsettled moment for the future of reproductive freedom. I wonder if the unsettled feeling would have been familiar to Hobbes as he penned Leviathan in the shadow of the English Civil Wars, sketching out a vision of great power that could counteract the chaos. On the other hand, what might Hobbes have recognized if he assumed not a collection of selfish individuals but a collective rooted in care and commitment to others?
In the Hebrew Bible, God brandishes his playthings, the beasts Behemoth and Leviathan, to prove His might over the mere mortal Job, who has been leveled to a state of powerlessness, an archetype of human vulnerability. Behemoth, the phallic powerhouse of the land, is not vulnerable to the waters: “If the river crashes (against him), he will not be alarmed. He would feel secure were the Jordan to rush in his mouth!” (Job 40:23). The fire-breathing king of the sea, by complement, another testament to the creator God’s “wisdom” (ḥokhma, a feminine noun), stirs the ocean, his cauldron, making it appear to have wild, white hair: “He has no match on earth, Who is made as fearless as he!” (Job 41:24).
I flip back from the end of the story, when Job defiantly talks back to the ultimate authority—“That is why I am fed up!” (Job 42:6)—to the beginning, when his life was first swept into ruin: “Job opened his mouth and cursed his day (of birth).” (Job 3:1-2). He must have felt like he was drowning in the grief that filled the shell of his life. Job wishes for death in the womb to avoid the pain inflicted by God from on high—a part played, in some suffering women’s stories, by rabbis. Job seeks out powerful people who can reign in those monsters who attend to the seas, Leviathan and Yamm (whom God had contained to let land emerge during Creation). Job wishes for death in his womb, freed from misery by the great equalizer, the tomb. God cannot understand him, at a distance, across great difference; his friends try to explain his plight (Job 3:1– 26, 22:13– 14, 42:6). He never wanted to be alone, but with friends and a God like this? Just set him free from intervention and free from the layers of explanation that justified injustice.
But Job did not need freedom; he needed justice, and he needed care. And Shira? She felt like she was drowning. Both yearned to be free from a certain kind of regulation, but left alone? Hardly. They wanted to be held: in the waters of tradition, in the company of loved ones and community. Job’s entry into my story of the mikveh disrupts secularism’s pressure to make my subjects choose either to accept pain as “good” religious actors or to reject it in the name of secular ethics. Job returns us to our creatureliness and utter dependence in the face of contingent, vulnerable, embodied life.
We are air-breathing mortals, and we are only in control some of the time over some elements of life. There are so many refractions of our watery life, which we bring and live in the mikveh: drowning in grief, surrender to the realities of our creatureliness, a small death to bring a new beginning. Inside the belly of the mikveh, for just a moment at a time, you feel the uncanny status of a liminal creature, like an unborn fetus. You are “temporarily relieved of [agency],” of responsibility over all that has befallen you. Maybe it’s not your fault. Maybe it’s beyond you to fix it. For better or worse, you are at the mercy of some other agent. And maybe, in the moment you feel least in control, there is something in those waters of tradition that will help you feel a little less alone. As the waters hold you, though, they take your breath away.
Excerpt adapted with permission from Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion by Cara Rock-Singer, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2026 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
