Mayim Rabim

It seemed like a good idea at the time: as the week before our upcoming wedding became more and more crowded with services and meals and miscellaneous gatherings, we decided that it was time to figure out when we'd fit in our mikvah dips. Not that my intended -- we'll call him Eliezer -- and I were necessarily planning on monthly visits, and we certainly weren't holding off on the horizontal hora till our nuptials, but a mikvah trip was what you did before a Jewish wedding, wasn't it? I definitely wanted to, Eli was less sure but thought it might be an interesting experience, and we both knew that mikvaot existed in our community somewhere or other. Clearly, I realized, we needed to learn more about our options -- and since Eli was doing invitations, I figured I could do mikvah research.

After checking for local mikvah information online with no luck, I decided to call the number provided by one webpage, which turned out to involve leaving a voicemail message on a particular extension at the local Jewish organization which coordinates my town's mikvah resources. I tried to explain the situation, the timing of my Sunday afternoon wedding, and my question about when a mikvah would actually be available for both me and Eli. The next day, I received voicemail from a pleasant but strongly accented female voice with a name I couldn't quite catch, wishing me mazel tov and urging me to call her at a home number on Friday morning; I did so twice, getting an answering machine each time, and finally a man (her husband, I guess) called me back and asked whom I was trying to reach at his number. "The mikvah lady," I said, slightly flummoxed but drawing on some ancestral memory. "Hold on," he said - in the same accent - and went to get her.

My actual conversation with the Mikvah Lady was equally puzzling. When I could come to the mikvah, she said, was quite simple: either Thursday night or Saturday night after Shabbos. Wouldn't the latter be awfully late after Daylight Savings kicked in, I asked? Yes, she admitted. And could I immerse first thing Sunday morning instead? No, but Eli could do so at the men's mikvah if he wished.

I was perplexed - I'd taken a class on women and Jewish law back in college, and I remembered that the original preference for women to dip at night was relaxed in cases of danger or even inconvenience. I was also fairly sure that Friday evening was a valid mikvah time, judging from the tradition of Shabbat shenanigans. And I knew from the website that our town had one full-time and one part-time women's mikvah: were all the women really supposed to fit themselves in in the evening? How long did it take to go to the mikvah, anyway? Besides, I rather liked the idea of dipping as soon as possible before the wedding to add a special dimension to the first time we had sex after the wedding, and the odds of my holding out from Thursday to Sunday were slim. But I was worried about sounding ignorant, and I was equally unenthusiastic about discussing my sex life with a strange woman I'd never met face-to-face. So I switched to the other question I had planned to ask.

"Actually, I was wondering if I could drop by the mikvah some time before my wedding and immerse, so that I'll know where everything is and how the procedure works." I figured that would let me meet the Mikvah Lady in person for further consultation and let me, well, see how it worked, how long it took, what I needed, and so forth. It wouldn't be nearly as weird to speak to her face to face. Plus, seeing the mikvah in advance would be kind of nice.

"Oh no," she said, very firmly. "You don't need to visit the mikvah until you're ready to get married." Uh-oh. I hadn't thought about it - after all, I knew people in our town who liked to use the mikvah for "spiritual cleansing," whatever that was - but apparently the Mikvah Lady wanted to discourage me from premarital Goings On, and pointing out that nothing she was likely to do would discourage us for a second was clearly not the way to go. So I tried to sound curious yet chaste.

"I know I don't need to, but what if I want to? To see what it's like?"

"You're welcome to make an appointment and visit with me - I have some pamphlets I can give you - and that way it won't be so terrifying." Terrifying? I opened and closed my mouth, realizing that any questions about what I was supposed to be terrified of would lead us to a Bad Place. Instead, I tried again, expressing my complete lack of terror and my genuine desire to experience the mikvah before wedding plans drove me insane, but no dice: since the Mikvah Lady knew I was single, she wasn't going to make me an appointment to actually immerse. So I politely affirmed my intent to call her nearer our wedding date, wished her a good Shabbos (not Shabbat, I knew that much), and hung up.

"Well," I announced to the apartment around me. "That was weird."

(to be continued...)

Dulcie is a thirtyish Jewish woman who averages out Conservative; she is writing about her experiences with tongue firmly planted in cheek. This essay is the first of a three-part series; the second essay is available here, and the final essay is available here.