In the Blue-Tiled Room
IN THE BLUE-TILED ROOM, I dropped the sheet and stood naked before the rabbi’s wife. She was the mother of my friend, Cookie. I was a bit cold but mainly embarrassed. I was twelve years old. My wavy hair was well-brushed, as instructed. I’d had a long bath before coming here to the mikvah, in the synagogue’s mysterious basement. In a kind voice, she held out a comb, directing me to comb my leg hair, armpit, and pubic hair. Then she pronounced me ready to enter the water.
Still enough of a child to anticipate the swimming pool aspects of the small mikvah, I stepped down into the lukewarm water. I paused on the last step, just my head peeking out. The rabbi and two other men—my day-school Jewish studies teachers, also rabbis—appeared soon after. While I knew they could only see my head, my heart sped up.
As an adopted child, who always knew I was adopted, I hadn’t realized I wasn’t considered legally Jewish. When my parents explained that this was a good time and place for me and my younger brother—who was also adopted—to complete the conversion process, I agreed. But I felt vaguely hurt. I went to Jewish day-school and synagogue every week. My parents, grandparents, and extended family were all Jewish. One of my uncles would ask me why I went to shul so much, saying, “What do you get out of it?” I told him I just liked it, liked the singing, leading prayers in the junior congregation, watching the velvet and silver-dressed Torah scrolls being paraded around. I loved hearing my grandfather read the entire portion on Shabbat during our summers in Winnipeg.
My parents had been honest about explaining adoption—but not about my murky Jewish status. I didn’t ask much about my birth parents growing up, mostly because I didn’t want to hurt my parents’ feelings. When my little brother got angry, he would yell, “Why don’t you give me back if you don’t love me?” Yet I didn’t think they would give either of us back. They were our parents. Still, it seemed like a risky thing to say aloud.
My parents told me that my birthparents weren’t Jewish. My father, a yeshiva graduate, had been advised to adopt a non-Jewish baby so there would be no issues around forbidden unions between Jews, e.g. adultery and incest. When they brought me home as a newborn, my father had gone to shul to name me. My brother, four-months old and already circumcised when adopted, had the required drawing of a drop of blood, (and a party) for his bris.
The prior year we had moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Milwaukee. Milwaukee had a much larger Jewish community, and my mother taught preschool at the Orthodox synagogue of a noted Satmar rabbi. My father decided that nobody would question this rabbi’s certification of our conversions. My father felt most at home in Orthodox synagogues, but my mother taught Hebrew school in Conservative and Reform synagogues.
Standing in the mikvah alcove’s doorway, the rabbi asked me whether I was choosing to do this of my own free will. Did I agree with the conversion? I told him I did. He asked if I would follow the commandments, the mitzvot. I said I would. He told me to go all the way under the water. I opened my eyes underwater and watched my hair float around me. When I bobbed up to the surface, he announced “Kasher,” and told me to go under again. Then a third time. I almost laughed. Kosher–like a hot dog!
My teachers and the rabbi left. I took the offered towel and went to change back into my dress. My little brother was next.
I was relieved the conversion was over, but a kernel of resentment rattled inside me. I loved Judaism and respected halacha, the law—but how could a dunk in the mikvah, a few questions, and a paper certificate with Hebrew script create what I already knew was inside me. What makes a soul Jewish?
I began to struggle with the restrictions on girls and women that I saw at school and in the Chabad camp where I worked. With an adolescent’s gift for being a truffle pig for hypocrisy, I couldn’t accept these limitations. I couldn’t swallow them even when they came alongside the message that we were “holier” than men because we tended the home. Clearly, studying texts was where the magic was. My Orthodox day-school teachers fended off or avoided answering my questions.
We moved again, this time to the Philadelphia area. A friend’s father, Alan Corre, a rabbi and Jewish studies scholar, suggested that I might like Akiba Hebrew Academy, a pluralistic and academic high school. My father didn’t think it was religious enough, but reluctantly agreed to send me.
There, I made deep friendships and met the quiet, clever boy who would later become my husband. Many of my Jewish studies teachers, both women and men, were young hippies, graduate students and future rabbis. Their passion and excitement showed me a way back to a Judaism I could own, the way I had in childhood. My boyfriend, in his kippah and tzitzit, won my heart—and charmed my parents.
In college, Neil and I observed Shabbat together and made our group house kosher for Passover. Our non-Jewish housemates were chill about it. But when we married a few years later, I struggled with going back to the mikveh. My father’s rabbi had handed me the pamphlet explaining mikveh for married women, yet my memories of the experience were mixed up with resentment and sadness. With the support of women friends who smoked a pre-immersion joint with me, I went to the local Orthodox option. It was beige and floral, very suburban. There were no directions about combing ancillary hair. That was a relief. Relaxed and a bit high, I submerged in the water and was again proclaimed kosher, this time by the mikvah attendant. It felt good to write a new memory of mikvah.
Neil and I joined a synagogue and sent our children to Jewish schools. Our synagogue, Germantown Jewish Centre, was egalitarian. I set about learning the skills that my brother had been taught, reading Torah, leading services, and giving a d’var Torah. My father, who was against egalitarianism in general, was completely in favor of it for his daughter. He loved to hear me leyn from the Torah.
In the 1990s, I read a story about an Israeli rabbi who was revoking conversions of individuals who were not living Orthodox lives. Anger and fear jostled with outrage. Who was he to decide that I was insufficiently observant to be Jewish? Would he or another extremist somehow invalidate my children’s religious status?
I have always respected the idea that Judaism has halacha, standards. Wishing and words are not enough to make one a Jew, but still, who gets to decide?
Men do, of course. In the Talmud, Ketubot 11a, Yoreh De-ah, it states that if a child accepts Judaism at bar or bat mitzvah, and lives a Jewish life, the conversion is permanent and can’t be revoked. However, if a child is converted in a non-observant family and does not live a Jewish life, then the child is judged to have not actually converted. My husband wasn’t concerned, but these news stories worried me.
Recently, I read about two innovative approaches to mikvah: Mayyim Hayyim and the Rising Tide project. Mayyim Hayyim was imagined and shepherded by the author Anita Diamant. Open to women, men, and “people of all genders and ages,” it’s a kosher mikvah that welcomes queer and non-traditional families and is accessible to people with disabilities. There are social stories for young people converting. The Rising Tide project includes open mikvaot around the world.
Women are creating these holy spaces, and it’s comforting to know they exist. In 1974, this wasn’t even a dream. If Mayyim Hayyim had existed, I doubt my father would have chosen it. My mother would always say, “All Jews are good Jews. You never know what someone will do later in their life. The rest of the world hates us. We should treat each other better.”
I’m sixty-three years old. I haven’t been to a mikvah in a long time. Maybe I’ll go to the Rising Tide mikvah a few miles from my house to mark my status as an elder when I turn 65. But if I go, it won’t be to prove to anyone that I’m observant. I’m Jewish enough for myself, for my husband, children, family, friends, and synagogue community. My soul knows its identity. It still likes submerging under water.
Having spent her childhood as the adopted child of Ashkenazi parents, Nini Engel keeps adding on to her Jewish-American-Canadian-Persian, and European identities.
