Mayim Rabim

11:30 Saturday night. My husband gets home, sees the envelope on the kitchen counter with my name on it, grabs it, slams the door behind him. Doesn’t wake the kids. I sit in bed, reading, not reading, waiting for him to return. 10 minutes later, he saunters into the bedroom. “I dropped it off. In the rabbi’s mailbox. It’s late. He didn’t open the door.”

Midnight. Phone rings. It’s the rabbi. My husband answers. “No, it’s not too late. Thanks for calling. She’s right here.” I take the phone. The soft, soothing voice of my niddah rabbi on the other end. “Mrs. X? I’m not sure what the shaelah is.”

So I tell him that the last three periods have been weird, but he knows this already because I’ve called him so many times, dropped off stained underwear and not-quite-clean bedikahs, waited for the verdict, which was always that they were fine, I could keep counting, hold my mikvah date, wouldn’t have to delay our separation any longer.

Until tonight.

I tell him about the four days of dark spotting at the beginning. He remembers from my phone call asking whether I was officially a niddah. I tell him about my four days of bright red heavy flow, how I’ve never had that many before. I started craving meat and bought chopped liver for Shabbat lunch because my iron was so low. I tell him how I tried on day five, laughing all the while, to get a clean hefsek, but there was no way that was happening, and I tell him how on day six, erev Shabbat, I didn’t even bother because the bleeding was so heavy. Then I tell him about how I tried again on Shabbat, and I surprised even myself by getting a clean hefsek, and I tell him how later that night, the blood was back again and bright red, and that’s my question, that’s what he’s looking at on the pad that I stuffed in an envelope for his scrutiny.

The rabbi is quiet. He is thinking, maybe he is trying to find a way to make it not niddah. “It IS red,” he says. It’s the first time in nearly five years of marriage that he’s told me I had to start all over again, that I couldn’t keep counting down to the day when I could embrace my husband after the peace of the mikvah waters. He is quiet when he says, “Maybe you should go to your doctor, Mrs. X. I don’t want it to be fibroids or something.”

I’d heard urban legends of niddah-expert rabbis catching cysts, cancer, and other conditions from simply looking at a stain and talking with a woman, but this was my first time experiencing it. He repeated what my midwife had said when I called her, panicked, earlier in the week. I felt cold though the furnace churned in the basement.

I hung up the phone and went to my computer, clicked on a search engine, typed in “fibroids.” I had two precious babies upstairs, 19 months apart, whom I had no trouble conceiving, no trouble carrying, no trouble birthing. Would I now face fertility troubles like my sister, my friends, so many people I knew? My husband walked in. “Please,” he pleaded. “Please turn off the computer and go to bed. This won’t help. You’ll just scare yourself.”

I looked at him. Oh how I missed him, and it hadn’t even been that long. We were brazen with our together days, fighting and insisting it’s ok if we don’t hug tonight, we always have tomorrow. I remembered what my kallah teacher had said, niddah sensitizes you to the details of life. I never thought I’d care whether I could pass the salt to him or not, but I do.

I shut down the computer, went upstairs. Moonlight streamed through the cracks in my bamboo shades. I listened for my children’s sweet breathing, saw my husband’s darkened form, banished in his bed against the wall. His body lifted and released. He slept.

The next day, as twilight neared, my hefsek was clear. Clean white. I began counting. Although it was only two days longer that we were apart this time, the week ached as it crept along. I missed my husband. My bed was huge, an empty sea, a lonely raft. Still, I was amazed at how my rabbi, with no medical training, could predict a condition by the strength of his Torah knowledge. I’d been questioning, cynical, stopped covering my hair four months before. I was fed up with people around me meticulously checking lettuce for bugs but trusting their children to unlicensed, dangerous day cares because they were run by Jews. I judged everyone harshly, seeing people walk the legal line of Halachah but ignore its ethical mandates. I wished I could take my niddah questions to a woman, hated having to ask men for permission to keep counting. I kept hitting my head on this glass ceiling. It was everywhere. I didn’t want to be kept in a corner.

But my compassionate rabbi, he knew. It’s eerie how Torah has everything, is all-knowing, far-reaching. Where was God in all this? I hadn’t thought of Him in ages.

The week passed. On Sunday, my husband left on a four-day business trip. That night, with the children tucked into sleep and the babysitter sitting on my couch, it was the first time I went to the mikvah knowing I’d come home to no waiting arms.

There was a line at the reception desk, so many women needing to purify themselves. I paid my money, walked to room 13, took off my clothes and filled the tub. Forty-five minutes later, I descended into the warm water of the mikvah, got to the platform and turned toward the wall. I could hear my breath against the tiles.

Taking a deep breath, I submerged. “Do it again,” she said. No one had ever told me that before.

I focused on the shiny blue of the pristine tiles; the water gulped as I went under. “Go deeper,” she said.

Third time, my hands massaged the warm water, I bent my knees, buried myself in the water’s promise. When I emerged, the mikvah lady announced, “Kosher.”

A second time. “Kosher.” A third time. “Kosher.” Then she stepped out of the room as I had asked her to and left me alone for that minute that I treasure each time, my one chance to contemplate and connect with the Source. “Please,” I whispered to the tiles. “Set me straight. Remind me that You’re here. Help me connect with what is true. Please.” Then I turned, ascended each careful step until the cold air hit my warm, wet body. I burrowed into my robe and returned to the world someone new.

~ Leah

Leah is a 33-year-old ba'alat teshuvah living in the Midwest region of the United States. A follow-up visit with her doctor revealed no medical problems.