The Western world has difficulty with sexual intimacy. One indication is the culture’s obsession with the subject. In almost every cultural expression from high art to low language, sexual innuendoes dominate the landscape.
It often reminds me of that quip from Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet”: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Rather than showing a free-and-easy approach to our physical relationships, this need to constantly mention the topic betrays discomfort with it.
Ironically, though the Western world has worked in the past century to free itself from religiously-imposed moral and sexual restraint, it’s been left with a souvenir that sexuality is somehow dirty.
Judaism opposes this outlook. In Jewish thought, physical intimacy contains the highest potential for spirituality. It is one of the greatest means a married couple is given to express holiness.
Like any other means, however, its use depends on the expression given to it by the individuals involved. The sexual union is like a canvas in the control of the artists — husband and wife — and the spiritual message they produce can be meaningless or a masterpiece.
At its highest use — in a Jewish marriage lived according to Jewish law — the sexual union brings holiness into the world, as it bonds husband and wife together, spiritually, physically and emotionally.
Closeness between a husband and wife is the re-creation on a physical plane of a deeper spiritual reality. According to Jewish thought, a husband and wife were originally one soul before birth, split when the younger of the two was conceived. When they reunite in marriage, their bond is unique because it represents the recreation of a single entity, of one soul.
In describing marriage, the Torah writes: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).
Yet this “oneness” is not easy to achieve. By marriage age, these half souls belong to individuals who have separate histories, experiences, likes and dislikes.
Fortunately, marriage itself provides abundant tools to overcome these superimposed differences and establish on the physical plane the same oneness that exists on the spiritual plane.
Perhaps the most powerful of the tools that foster oneness in marriage is sexual intimacy. All the wonderful feelings a couple has in a relationship culminate in the physical intimacy between husband and wife.
Once universal
If God gave intimacy this extraordinary power, it makes sense that God would give us guidelines — a medium — to use it to its maximum potential. Indeed, that’s the case. We call this medium mikvah.
Mikvah and the accompanying discipline called “family purity” were once well known and universally practiced in Jewish homes.Today, not only has this institution been forgotten by the vast majority of Jewish families, but marriage itself has lost much of its status.
In former times, values were different. Jewish families not only knew about mikvah and family purity, they risked their lives to practice them.
Mikvah means collection. In physical terms, it refers to a pool that is used to collect “natural” water, untouched by human hands, such as rainwater or water from rivers and underground springs.
A mikvah is of such significance that the rabbis of Talmud ruled that if a Jewish community has neither a mikvah nor a synagogue, building a mikvah takes priority.
A mikvah is used by both Jewish men and women who immerse in it before certain holy acts. Though it looks like a bath, it’s not. When Jewish law mandates use of a mikvah, the user must be clean and bathed before immersion. A mikvah is a spiritual tool; it has no association with hygiene.
The Torah mentions mikvah most prominently in connection with the Jewish High Priest who immersed in its waters five times during the Yom Kippur services when the Holy Temple stood in Jerusalem.
Today, the most important use of mikvah is by women, who immerse in it as one step in the cycle of reunion and separation between husband and wife known as family purity.
No brief description of family purity can suffice to insure its proper practice. And no brief description of its benefits can adequately explain its beauty. Only practicing it can convey its remarkable nature.
And yet, because this pillar of traditional Jewish life is now so foreign to us, it’s often misunderstood.
In the practice of family purity, a Jewish couple separates when the wife gets her monthly period, and physical contact doesn’t resume until seven days following the conclusion of her period.
On the eve of the night that the couple is to resume physical relations, the wife immerses in the mikvah, where she prays inviting God to sanctify the forthcoming intimacy.
Essentially, the sexual union is an affirmation of life, as the couple joins in the sacred endeavor to draw a new soul from its heavenly source into this world.
Conversely, the time when a couple is allowed no contact is associated with the period of time when the woman undergoes a loss of life potential, as the unfertilized ovum is expelled from her body.
When the husband and wife wait for this time to elapse and the wife employs the mikvah before rejoining her husband in physical intimacy, their union represents a reaffirmation of the powers of life over death. It is a rising above our mortality.
The cessation of physical relations between husband and wife has no connection to a feeling of revulsion over the woman’s monthly flow, as is often mistakenly assumed. Such a concept has no home in Jewish sources.
Though the mysteries of mikvah are bound up in this interplay between life and death, it’s clear that the role mikvah plays is deeper than our understanding of life and death, because Jewish law calls for the use of mikvah even among couples for whom procreation is not possible.
Indeed, Jewish law calls for the pursuit of a healthy sexual relationship in married couples of all ages, and considers it an independent value — indeed, a spiritual value — whether or not creation of life is possible.
Awesome moments
In Leviticus 16, we read about the Yom Kippur service as practiced when we had a Temple in Jerusalem.
At the climax of the service, the High Priest would enter the innermost chamber of the Temple, the holiest space on earth, the Holy of Holies, where he would ask forgiveness for the nation’s shortcomings throughout the previous year.
No one but the High Priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, and he, as the holiest representative of the holy Jewish nation, was allowed there once a year, for a short time, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year.
For seven days beforehand, the High Priest prepared himself for that moment. The night before, a team of great Jewish leaders kept him awake all night, quizzing him and pushing him to the heights of his moral and spiritual potential.
After that, the High Priest had one final preparation to make. He immersed himself in the mikvah.
The resumption of the act of intimacy of a Jewish woman with her husband is a similarly awesome moment. After her seven days preparing for that moment, a woman immerses in a mikvah to elevate her relationship with her husband and to elevate the world itself.
How can immersing in something as plain as water have such a profound effect? Water is the most spiritual of all the physical elements.
The opening Genesis describes the creation of many things. But though water is referred to (“The breath of God hovered above the face of the waters” — Genesis 1:2), there is no mention of its creation. Our sages learn from this that water pre-existed our account of creation and the earth itself.
A mikvah, containing waters untouched by human hands, is the closest thing we have to a piece of heaven on earth. It gives us the opportunity to reunite with our spiritual source.
Just before a woman immerses herself in these waters, she says a prayer, inviting God to sanctify her marriage.
What she says through the prayer, in effect, is: “Almighty, this is the most sacred relationship in my life. This, our conjugal union, is one of the greatest expressions of that sacred relationship, and I don’t want something as sacred as this to be devoid of Your Presence. I want You to join me in this act. I want You to be there.” And then she immerses and, in a sense, touches hands with the creator of the world.
The late Rabbi Shlomo Twerski, my brother-in-law and a brilliant Torah scholar, said that it is particularly appropriate that going to the mikvah is a woman’s responsibility, as opposed to a man’s, because mikvah sanctifies the family, and it is the wife’s wisdom, more than that of any other family member, that builds the home.
In a sense, a woman creates her family. For nine months before their births, she shapes a perfect internal environment for her children; then, for nearly two decades after birth, she sculpts their emotional, mental and physical environment.
If she doesn’t have children, she’s still the one, who, in most families, will have the most creative influence on the home atmosphere.
When a woman goes to the mikvah, she — the human creator — asks the Creator of the universe to come back home with her, to join her in her sacred activities, and foremost of these, to join her in her marriage.
Beneficial effects
The Talmud (Niddah 31b) explains a simple rule of human nature in discussing sexuality: something constantly available to us eventually loses its luster in our eyes. We allow routine to replace excitement, and grow contemptuous and bored.
Boredom in marriage is no trifling matter. It is extremely destructive and in our times, it is a leading cause of divorce.
This is the first and most obvious advantage of mikvah. For approximately two weeks every month, a husband and wife are off limits to each other.
Because of this monthly “vacation,” the Talmud tells us, a husband and wife become like a bride and groom to one another each month, again and again. If you doubt it, ask any couple who practices mikvah and they’ll confirm it, although they may blush.
Second, mikvah teaches the value of restraint. In a world where infidelity is common — there have been estimates that almost one of every two married men has been unfaithful — people have to learn the art of restraint. Unfortunately, it’s not taught in school.
Within the Jewish marriage relationship, if a husband and wife can’t have access to each other at regular intervals, it means they must learn to control themselves within the marriage.
Outside the marriage, when a temptation develops and they’re called upon to exercise restraint, they know how to respond. It’s not as if they’re suddenly called upon to run 10 miles when they’ve never run a block.
Third, mikvah gives us invaluable “spaces in our togetherness,” to adapt the phrase of poet Khalil Gibran. It affords us the opportunity to be ourselves in a way not otherwise possible.
In marriage it’s easy for two people to get lost in each other and not know where one ends and the other begins. This is not the Jewish ideal.
The “oneness” of a Jewish marriage is not a unity of sameness, of identical mates who neither oppose nor challenge one another. Rather, it’s a dynamic interaction between two individuals who maintain their identities, even though they are joined by one goal; one heart and one soul.
Two people who strengthen their individuality during this time of separation join again and enrich each other precisely because they’ve strengthened that part of themselves that’s theirs and only theirs.
Finally, mikvah teaches us that we are not objects. Through it, the wife and husband say to each other: Because I don’t belong to you and you don’t belong to me in the same way we do during the togetherness period, I’m compelled to treat you as a whole person, not as an object for my pleasure.
This is an invaluable lesson in our society, which, for all its obeisance to feminism, continues to treat women as objects — in advertising, at the workplace and too often in the home itself.
We also learn to communicate better with each other through mikvah. Many problems can be glossed over by a hug and kiss.
During the two weeks without physical contact, a couple has to learn how to talk about everything, including difficult things. We get to know each other’s inner thoughts in ways we might not otherwise. Real intimacy is the result.
These benefits just scratch the surface of the spiritual effects mikvah has on our lives and on the world. There are depths to this practice we, as humans, cannot fathom.
But one thing is clear:Without serving a higher purpose, our physical intimacy is just that — physical.
With mikvah — and God’s presence — the sexual relationship changes from something completely physical, an act which subhuman species also engage in, to an act of holiness and the highest expression of two people.
Rebbetzin Feige Twerski of Congregation Beth Jehudah is an outreach activist, lecturer and author. This article was originally distributed by the Kaddish Connection Network of Aish Hatorah Resources and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
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