Foreign Waters By Ruchama King Feuerman
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I loved Jerusalem like a young woman loves a poor, older, yet gifted man—desperately, soulfully, against her better judgment. You see, Jerusalem, even as it was the hottest spiritual hub on earth, was starting to get me down. I missed seeing leafy oak and maple trees. I didn’t care for the men I was dating.
But mainly, I wasn’t happy at my job: a local women’s yeshiva, where I was paid a stipend to study Jewish texts while helping beginners acquire their own skills. It was a hyper-rationalist yeshiva that expanded my mind but left my soul hungry. To understand Maimonides properly, I had to know something of Aristotle, and to understand Rav Kook, I needed to acquaint myself with Schopenhauer and Hegel. It was all very stimulating, but I often felt like a walking brain.
I was longing for an Experience, the kind my yeshiva couldn’t offer. The students were American women, many of them from Ivy-League colleges, some here on scholarship for their year abroad. Intellectually sharp, but with a certain suffocation of emotion. I couldn’t imagine describing a spiritual experience to them. Someone would surely pipe up: How do you define ‘spiritual’? Or: ‘How would you contextualize ‘experience’?
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I decided to bolt Jerusalem for the summer and head for the mystic city of Tsfat in the vague hope of finding that elusive Experience.
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And then my job ended. Either I got fired or I left on my own—I can’t even recall, that’s how much of a slump I was in. I had some savings. I decided to bolt Jerusalem for the summer and head for the mystic city of Tsfat in the vague hope of finding that elusive Experience.
I sought out the most ba’al teshuva establishment of all, settling on a Lubavitch school for young women, known to its students as The Machon. Surrounded by all those intense returnees to Yiddishkeit, I was hoping I’d get a contact high.
The Machon was housed in a crusader-like fortress with a thick olive tree that grew profusely in its courtyard. We were a minute’s walk from the artists’ quarter and the synagogues and holy places that made Tzfat famous as the birthplace of Kabbalah.
I grew to like it there. The yeshiva food was decent. The sunsets did outrageous things to the sky—with colors so thick and intense they looked like a floozy with overdone make-up. The beginner Torah classes were on the easy side—but the Hasidic classes grabbed me. In spite of myself I loved the rebbe’s expositions on the Torah, or sichas. His metaphorical explanations delved poetically beyond the text. Here was concerto grosso—the interweaving of mind and soul.
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Here was a bizarre blend of the primitive and the profound, the holy and the ridiculous.
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As for the young women, they were of diverse backgrounds but united in their intensity. I heard blow-you-away stories about their spiritual epiphanies. Down the hall a South African girl who’d been the lead singer of an internationally successful punk rock group had taken an oath that she would eat less than 1000 calories a day, and now a group of rabbis had to release her from her impetuous vow. Kinneret, an elfin, limp-haired girl straight out of the Israeli army, floated down the streets of Tsfat, handing out flowers and kosher cookies to passersby. She lived at the other end of the hall and during lunch break would play exquisite guitar. One Israeli girl from a simple village up North was convinced all problems – war, bad parenting, unemployment -- could be solved with the right amulet. Here was a bizarre blend of the primitive and the profound, the holy and the ridiculous.
And no one knew what to make of me. I obviously knew a lot, but my questions in class had a subversive edge. “How can the Rebbe put up with everyone hanging his picture in their living room?” And I’d kick myself. Why say that? Such remarks put a barrier between me and the text, and between me and the others. The young women cast me sorrowful or angry looks. And I was alone in my head bubble.
One evening, Nadine, my Belgian roommate, invited me to join a group of students who were going to the mikva, or ritual bath, of the great kabbalistic Master, Rabbi Isaac Luria, better known as the Ari. Finally, here was an opportunity to be more like the other sincere, seeking women at the Machon.
Still, I said cautiously, “You’re not going to make any blessings at the mikva, are you?” That, I knew, was forbidden.
“’Course not!” Nadine said. She assured me it wasn’t that kind of mikva, the kind married women went to for ritual immersion. This was the famed Ari’s mikva. It held special powers. People came from across the world to dip in its icy waters. “Whoever goes to this mikva,” Nadine said, her dark eyes shining, “the Ari promised they’ll do a complete teshuvah (repentance) before they die!”
“Okay, I’ll do it,” I said.
At about eleven at night ten of us set out, tracing a pitch black path that cut through a mountain etched with graves. It was too dark to see the graves of all the kabbalist greats we were passing, Rabbi Chaim Vital, Rabbi Moshe Cordova, even the tomb of the Ari himself. We walked rapidly, as we had been warned that wild boars, cows, and other disgruntled animals roamed the mountainside cemetery at night.
Halfway down, two girls dropped away. Then Sarah left. She had been quiet the whole way down and when we arrived in front of the stone mikva strucure she said, “You know, this just doesn’t sit right with me.” So now there were seven.
We grouped anxiously around the entrance. There could be men inside the mikva in a state of undress. How ironic if this holy field trip ended in impropriety. “Is anyone there?” we called out, and waited. Again, we called out “Anyone there?” Silence. Finally, I stuck my head in and said in a loud, obnoxious voice, “Women are entering the mikva now!”
From the dark recesses we heard a man’s voice. “Eh?!” There were noises, as if he were rousing himself. A quarter of an hour later, a rumpled Hasidic man emerged with damp, loosely-curled peyos, holding his socks and shoes.
“Do really you want to go in?” he asked.
“Yes,” we said.
“It’s not really the custom for ladies, but go if you want.” He crouched on a stool and put on his socks.
What he said wasn’t actually true. Women quietly did go to the Ari’s mikva, but I didn’t want to start any argument.
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What am I doing here, I thought.
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The plan was, Vicky the American would keep guard outside, in case any men happened by. The six of us entered. There was a wet, tiled floor, then another room, all cave-like under a domed ceiling. The mikva was built on a ravine and got its freezing waters from the natural spring just below. I could actually see the clear spring water trickling in through a rock. Mayim chayim, I thought. Living waters. A few lit candles were plunked down on the floor next to the mikva, the molten wax making little white mounds.
Nadine announced, “These waters are freezing. When you go in, put some on the back of your neck. It prepares you.”
We stared at the water and said nothing. I hate being cold. I’m the kind who takes fifteen minutes to enter a pool and get her face wet. I shivered. “What am I doing here?” I thought.
I looked around. Now there were only four of us. The reality of our crazy expedition was beginning to dawn on me, but we’d come this far, and at any moment a man might want to enter and use the mikva. That got me moving fast.
Strangely for me, I didn’t feel at all embarrassed as I prepared to enter the mikva, just focused on the task and concerned that my clothes shouldn’t get wet. I gave my towel to Nadine. I walked down the three steps that led into the waters and stepped inside.
Do you know there is a cold that is so cold it feels burning hot? My calves froze and burned and froze in that ice water. I went in deeper, waist high, and the water attacked me with tiny icy knives. I wasn’t thinking, I was doing, moving like a force, as the waters reached my shoulders, then my neck. Finally, I dunked under, trying to sink down far enough so that no hair should float to the top of the water. I lifted my feet off the floor at the same time, opening my mouth and eyes, my fingers spread wide, so that there were no chatzizahs—no barriers—between me and the waters—the usual procedure for immersions.
I shot up. Gasping, crying, breathing so hard I didn’t recognize the sounds were coming from me. Then I went down again and popped up, gasping, crying for air. And when I came up the third time, still gasping, I only thought of all the single girls who wanted to get married, especially two friends of mine over forty. I turned and walked up the stairs as fast as I could.
Nadine was holding the towel, her face alive and questioning. I grabbed the towel. “How was it?” she asked. “Is it very cold?”
I shook my head, shuddering. “Just go in, don’t ask any questions, don’t think, just do it, do it quickly!” Then shivering, I quickly dressed and had to leave the mikva.
Something about my own gasping had shocked me. I was frightened by my response.
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I shot up. Gasping, crying, breathing so hard I didn’t recognize the sounds were coming from me.
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Vicky was pacing outside, doing her job guarding. “I don’t think I’ll go into the mikva,” she commented.
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t feel like talking. My body was still letting out little shudders. We waited for the others to immerse and then join us outside. We waited and waited. Minutes later, I heard a huge gasp, a panting, crying noise, powerful, like a trapped animal. It was scary and beautiful.
“Who’s that?” I said suddenly. “Who’s that?”
Vicky peeked her head in. “It’s Nadine.”
“I—I thought it was me,” I said awkwardly. It sounded like my own sounds.
Vicky said in a low voice, “I didn’t understand what was happening to you in there, if you were crying.”
No, I hadn’t been crying. I couldn’t explain. I had definitely felt something. But what?
Then I realized. It was simply a physiological reaction to extreme cold. That made sense. I felt my mind kicking in, wanting to dismiss whatever it was—and I still didn’t know what it was—I’d felt.
But no. I thought of the verse in Psalms, “Tzamah lecha nafshi”—my soul longs for you, my body longs for you. It was as if my body had known something that my mind couldn’t. A body could apprehend God, not just a mind. That’s what I’d felt there, under the cruelly cold waters. And even though I had warmed up by now, I kept shuddering at the memory.
Next Hagit went in. She also gasped, but it had a different pitch to it. It comforted me that we all didn’t sound exactly the same. I went back inside the mikva. Two other Machon girls had materialized.
Nadine pointed to Hagit. “You’re wearing my slip.” They both giggled and switched.
Nadine came over to me. “You were wonderful,” she said quietly. “You came out smiling, like this” and she showed me a very young, alive face. “You just went straight in. When we heard your sounds, we said, ‘Is she crying? She must be making teshuvah.’ We were scared, but when we saw you come out with that look on your face, so shiny, we knew it would be all right.”
No, I wasn’t ‘making teshuvah.’ Or maybe a different kind than the Ari had had in mind when he’d made his promise. For the first time in a long time, I had put my analytic mind to rest and had jumped inside, straight into the waters. For once, no barriers between me and the world. It was exhilarating.
One last girl approached the steps, a cute, plump blond girl, very pure-looking. We gave her encouraging words. She still had the towel on and she turned around. “Do you all have to be here?” she said plaintively. We sheepishly left.
Finally, she too exited the mikva, and the six of us made our way up the mountain, to our fortress in the old section of town, joking and exchanging stories. Hey, I thought. I’m one of the gang.
The rest of my stay in Tsfat went easier. My need to provoke dissipated. I saved my heretical questions for the teachers in private sessions. I participated in the yeshiva talent show, and for the heck of it went on a Lubavitch outreach operation, offering Shabbat candles in downtown Tsfat to the uninitiated. “Go find yourself another sacrifice,” an old lady muttered to me. I felt punched in the gut. For a moment I was energized by the insult—I’ll take on the whole damn shopping mall, inundating them with candle sticks!—but gave up a minute later. The truth was, I made a lousy proselytizer. But so what? The other students warmed to me, and I to many of them.
Experiences fade. And the Ari’s promise notwithstanding, so did this one. I realized it wasn’t an Experience I had been seeking, but to replenish myself. I’d grown stale, so had my academic-style Judaism, and Jerusalem as a result took on a faded, tired look. The real replenishing came when I returned to Jerusalem with a love for Hasidic study. That’s something that I can come back to and have, throughout the years.
Though, all these years later, in the midst of my Jewish suburban life in New Jersey—carpools and tuition angst and all—I sometimes close my eyes and remember that night when the mikva literally blasted me away. I remember the waters that replenished themselves from a spring below, those waters that were so cold and so hard and so good.
Ruchama King Feuerman is a book coach, writing instructor, and award-winning novelist. Her novel, "Seven Blessings" was hailed in the New York Times for how it captured the "subtlety and magic" of the Torah's traditions. Her new book, "Everyone's Got A Story -- 42 stories from a new generation of Jewish writers" will be coming out, G-d willing, this May. Her article “Foreign Waters” originally appeared in “World Jewish Digest”, 2007