Mikva

I've never been to a mikva before, but the hot water died here on Thursday night, and I really needed a shower Friday, or else it would be 3 days w/o a shower. So Friday afternoon I went with someone from the dorm to the mikva. A mikva here includes a hot shower before, so for 8 shekels ($2) it would be worth it.

The mikva turns out to be in the Arab quarter, oddly enough. The little courtyard was deserted, which was surprising to me, on a Friday afternoon. There was one of those big cheese cutter turnstyles with a coin entry box near it, to get in. Inside it was like a gym shower room: rubber mat floors, benches, tiled walls. There were more people inside than appeared outside, but it was oddly quiet. I started talking to the guy who brought me, but he shushed me, and said that you don't talk in the mikvah, which was actually kind of nice. My glasses fogged up immediately, which is a good thing, in a room full of naked men.

The hot shower was fantastic--the best since I've been here. Small, but perfectly formed. Walked over to the mikvehs without toweling when I was done. They were two small tiled pools, like hot tubs, but about 5' deep, and about 6' wide. One hot, and one cold. I was hoping to use the hot one, but it had 5 guys in it already, and 6 naked men in a pool less than an armspan across isn't my idea of fun. So I went into the cold pool, which had only 1 other guy in it.

"Cold" really turned out to be room temperature. A little chilly on first contact, but you adjust quickly. I got in, and stood in the corner.

One concept I've heard about the mikveh is related to the concept of 1/60: if you drop unkosher food into a pot of kosher food by accident, or a drop of milk into a pan of stew, if the total volume of the unkosher material is less than 1/60 of the surrounding material, the small amount is nullified--it becomes as if it doesn't exist. Aryeh Kaplan describes how the minimal size of a mikveh has the same effect: your body volume will be small enough to be nullified by the water in the mikveh. When immersed completely, you become nullified, essentially dead.

I breathed a few times, then exhaled and submerged. Sinking below the surface, feet off the ground, you get a little dizzy. For 10 seconds, I was dead. Which feels remarkably purifying. I dunked three times and came out. 42 years of impurity washed off, I hope, which I really need.

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Cold today--cold enough to freeze ice on the cars when I got up this morning.

Spent this afternoon's Shabbat with some friends of my cousin. She was the most upbeat person I've ever met--a Muppet in the name of G-d. The woman was a child in Poland during the Shoah. Both she and her mother were captured by the Germans. Her father was a partisan, and gave her up to a Polish family to take care of; they took care of her for a year before a neighboring family told the Nazis that she wasn't their child. She kept in touch with them by mail after the war, until the mid 60s. In the last letter from her host family, they told her that the family that turned her in was still resentful about her making it through alive, and that other families in the village were too. The sons were growing up, and were claiming that when they grew up they were going to find her. So, the family said, please don't write back, in case they intercept one of these letters and find out where you are.