I scheduled my trip to the mikveh for four days before my wedding. On the subway ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I tried to shut out the noise of planning. Instead of answering emails or checking my to-do lists, I closed my eyes and tried to prepare myself emotionally.
I arrived early, and was guided into a small bathroom. I followed the printed to-do list sitting on the counter: I undressed and took off my jewelry, brushed and flossed my teeth, then trimmed my fingernails, remnants of the red polish I’d taken off earlier that day just barely visible around the edges. Then I showered, combed my wet hair and wrapped myself in a too-big terrycloth robe, sticking my feet in matching too-big slides. Lastly, I removed my contact lenses. Then I pressed the button on the room’s internal door.
I’d been to a mikveh once before, over a decade earlier, while visiting a kibbutz in Israel. It had been a difficult year: I’d had major surgery for my Crohn’s disease, and then been with my grandmother as she’d died. I had felt marred by these close experiences with death. So, when I was offered the chance to use the kibbutz’s mikveh, I took it. I remember emerging from the pool feeling ready to start a new chapter. I was hopeful that my pre-wedding mikveh visit would provide me with a similar sense of clarity.
When choosing a mikveh, I’d read accounts of brides traveling to Massachusetts to go to the progressive Mayyim Hayyim, but didn’t have the time to take that on myself. I decided to stay local, contacting mikvehs I’d heard about through my network. The attendant who met me on the other side of the door was the same woman I’d spoken to on the phone when I’d made my appointment; I’d explained that I identified as Conservative, and didn’t plan on following the laws of niddah once I was married. I’d felt confident then, but as I stood facing her on the pool’s narrow deck, listening to her lay out the procedure, I sensed that this experience was reserved for a club that I wasn’t a member of, and she didn’t fully understand why I was there. She asked me if I could read Hebrew, and I said yes. She pointed toward the blessing printed on the back wall, and explained when I’d have to read it aloud. “I can’t see that without my contacts though,” I told her nervously. “Fine then,” she said. I tried to ignore the doubt in her voice. “You can repeat after me.”
As I stood naked in the deepest part of the pool, the attendant and I recited the blessing, word by word:
“Baruch.”
“Baruch.”
“Atah.”
“Atah.”
Out of the bracha’s 12 words, the first 10 were ones I’d said by heart each week since I could speak, lighting Shabbat candles next to my mom and sister. I’d told her I could read Hebrew, surely I could handle more than one word at a time? I dunked beneath the water, more focused on the flush of embarrassment hitting my face than on the ritual I’d come to perform.
Back on the deck, she asked me when my wedding was. “It’s this Saturday night after Shabbos ends,” I told her, using the Ashkenazi pronunciation in an attempt to shift the impression I now imagined she had of me. Then, she wished me great luck with this simcha. “Do you know that word, simcha?”
“Of course!” I replied, my voice growing thin with insecurity.
She continued on: “It means a happy occasion.”
Back on the street, my wet hair hanging heavily down my back, I blinked back tears. I sensed that she was trying to be inclusive. But months of wedding planning had left me feeling burnt out on defending my Jewishness. While my childhood was filled with two sets of dishes, synagogue, Jewish summer camp (until age 12, when the cattiness sent me running) and extensive college Hillel involvement, my half-Jewish husband-to-be had primarily been raised Catholic. Although parts of his extended family feel very Jewish, being Jewish has never been his primary identifier in the way that it is mine.
Early into dating, he’d said something about wanting a Christmas tree. Spiraling into uncertainty, I called my mom. “Take it one day at a time,” she said., already sensing how much I liked him. “If you really love each other, it’ll be easy to make accommodations.” She was right. Over the years, it’s become easy to make decisions related to our Jewishness. I’ve come to value the way that we challenge each other to consider what we hold important.
When it came to wedding planning, we didn’t want to include any tradition unless we’d done our best to understand it, and it felt meaningful to us. But considering how each decision we made would be read by all of our guests — Jewish, Catholic and everything in-between — felt fraught. On video calls with my future in-laws, I felt responsible for explaining why I wanted a bedeken (the veiling ceremony), or Sheva Brachot (the seven blessings) read in Hebrew as well as English interpretations. But discussing wedding plans with my Jewish friends, I found myself trying to justify why we weren’t having two men sign our ketubah, or why we were having a pescetarian menu instead of kosher catering.
On any given day, I felt both too Jewish and not Jewish enough. Going to a mikveh was a choice I’d made for me; it wasn’t public facing like the rest of the wedding. But I hadn’t anticipated that there too I’d feel like I had to prove my Jewishness.
The morning of our wedding was crisp and clear. We’d chosen a location abutting the beach, despite the mid-November date. I woke up early, pulled on sneakers and a long wool coat, and slipped out a side entrance of the hotel. I briskly walked the quarter mile to the beach, and cut across the sand. My phone, buzzing with messages from the florist, hairdresser and caterers, was deep in my pocket, the force of the wind masking its attempts on my attention.
Reaching the water’s edge, I crouched down and waited for the waves to rush towards me, licking the tips of my shoes. I dipped my hands into the cold water and held them to my face, relishing the drips that slid down my neck. The sensation of the water on my skin made me feel clean and pure. I thought of the words we say during Havdalah: “Ha-mavdil bein kodesh l’chol” — the separation between the ordinary and the holy. This was the emotional grounding I’d hoped to get out of going to a mikveh. It might not look like how I’d envisioned it, but it was a reminder that I didn’t need to prove my sense of Jewishness to anybody but myself. I closed my eyes, and tilted my face up to the sun.