The California county where I live has no official mikveh, or Jewish ritual bath. But every year on my birthday, I find a trail in nature that reaches some remote lake or a secluded bend in a river, and there I let myself slip into the ancient waters under a bright sky.
In generations past, it would have been unthinkable for a county with six synagogues to have no mikveh. There have been mikvehs for as long as there have been synagogues. Last year, archaeologists unearthed a mikveh in Ostia Antica, near Rome. It is thought to date back 1600 years, making it the oldest mikveh outside of Israel.
Immersion in mayim chayim, or “living waters,” is an ancient practice. In the mikveh, whose water must flow from a natural source, we wash away ritual impurity, which in Jewish law can arise for many physical and spiritual reasons. Mikveh has been a particularly central practice (and burden) for Jewish women, who would traditionally be required to immerse following menstruation or childbirth.
So central was mikveh to Jewish life that communities would go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that a working mikveh existed. In Friedberg, Germany, the 13th-century Jews excavated through 82 feet of basalt to reach groundwater. Getting in the mikveh required one to descend 72 very steep (and slippery) steps.
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My own ancestors’ southern German village of Ehrstädt, which had fewer than 70 Jews, borrowed money they didn’t have for their mikveh. When they built their one-room prayerhouse in 1836, they dug the mikveh underneath, and had water pumped from a nearby spring. The synagogue closed in 1912. Since then, despite two restorations, there is no sign of the old mikveh, as if it simply evaporated like Miriam’s well upon her death.
So how does purification by water work? Does water have magical qualities or chemical properties that remove impurity? In a midrash, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai says no. The water is ordinary; the purification comes from the bather fulfilling God’s commandment. The Talmud goes even further. Interpreting Jeremiah 17:13, which says, mikveh Yisrael Adonai, Rabbi Akiva reads this Hebrew not with the common understanding of “Adonai is Israel’s hope” but instead as “Adonai is Israel’s mikveh.” This suggests that while we step physically into water, it is the divine that we immerse in.
Saying “it’s not the water, it’s God” creates an opportunity for innovation and improvisation. For those for whom elements of today’s Orthodox mikveh practice might be impracticable (“we don’t have one”) or inaccessible (“I can’t easily get in”) or uninviting (“they won’t know what to do with my gender”), this permission to innovate opens the doors to mikveh experiences that are not limited to physical immersion.
I have participated in meditative mikveh (sitting with eyes closed, receiving spoken guidance), imaginal mikveh (a circle of people outdoors, taking turns going to the center and moving as if swimming and dunking), and sound mikveh (surrounded by a field of gentle sound). I have collected living water in a bowl and, with a specific kavanah, or intention, have poured it over my head. I have run outdoors in a downpour and mouthed the blessing for mikveh immersion. And of course, natural bodies of water – oceans, lakes, and most rivers – qualify as mikvehs even by strictest Orthodox reckoning and often provide a more visceral sense of immersing in the divine than any indoor, plastic-lined facility could provide.
Decoupling purification from literal water also empowers the 19th-century Dinover Rebbe, known as the B’nai Yissachar, to imagine a completely metaphorical mikveh. Noting the traditional volume of water in a mikveh (960 lugin), he argues that the month of Elul and the Ten Days of Repentance, with their total of 960 hours, constitute a mikveh in time. We enter this “mikveh in time” at the beginning of Elul and emerge at the end of Yom Kippur, reborn and transformed; atomized and reassembled.
The fact that immersion has largely fallen out of the ritual vocabulary of progressive Jews is a loss. The use of mikveh for conversion or before a wedding is still widely practiced. But there are so many more liminal moments in our lives when immersing, dowsing, or even imaginally invoking a pool of water could offer healing and hope: a milestone birthday; becoming an empty nester; finishing a course of chemotherapy; beginning or completing an element of gender transition; after the death of a loved one; after a breakup; after a miscarriage; launching a new undertaking; moving in with a beloved. All of these are reflective moments when we ask the question, “Who am I now?” Stepping into ancient water and emerging from it offers us a chance for rebirth. This is key spiritual self-care.
On my birthday jaunts, when I end up at the pond or lake or river, I sometimes find myself channeling my grandmother, taking forever to work my way into the icy water and sometimes calling it quits at knee-deep, opting to spritz rather than immerse. That works too, but when I get myself fully underwater, I’m always glad I did. While under the surface, I feel held and cradled. I inevitably feel tears being drawn from me, water to water. In those seconds, I mourn the struggles of this world and the griefs of my own life, my physical buoyancy at odds with the heaviness of existence. Perhaps this is what makes mikveh so well suited for mourning; it is a natural portal to grief. (Listen, for instance, to this compelling performance of medieval Hebrew laments, recorded inside a 12th-century mikveh in Speyer, Germany.)
When I am immersing in water, I sense how all water is connected. The first time we meet the word mikveh in Torah, it is the third day of Creation, and God is causing a gathering (mikveh) of the waters to expose dry land for the first time (Genesis 1:10). This gathering is of all waters, not just some.
In the mikveh, I feel like I am touching all water – trickling from mountains and rolling to the sea; gushing from underground springs; evaporating into cloud and returning as rain. Water sustains life by becoming part of life. It makes up over half my body. In the mikveh, I return to the water – this particular water and all water. The local waters of the Russian River, and also the waters of Miriam’s well, and the underground pools of Friedberg and Speyer and Ostia Antica. Every mikveh is connected in a great lattice-work of mayim chayim, of living waters. With a blessing and a breath, I dunk and dissolve.
This essay initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on August 1, 2026. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
