I am naked. Chava, the mikveh lady, has said she’ll listen for me to enter the pool. The room contains a shower, sink, and toilet in an alcove. Think spa. In the shower, where I scrub myself clean according to directions on a laminated card, the soap smells of flowers and mint. Chava says she will enter the room only once I’m submerged. I wonder how she can know that only by listening.
Outside the blue door to the mikveh, in a small waiting room with pamphlets and a guestbook, sit Chava, three rabbis, and my husband. Alone in the mikveh, I descend the seven stairs into the pool. Let me rephrase that: I practically jump into the pool and loudly splash in my haste to submerge my nakedness as soon as possible. I’m unsure that this is the holy experience I’d been expecting as the conclusion of my conversion to Judaism.
Miriam Lilian D Or: “Hahaha! Only women can get that into it. I read a blog where a woman said it was so emotional that she went home and cried the rest of the day. Probably from the extra soul she gained at the mikvah.”
