No place for shaming at the mikveh
Sadly, the chief rabbi, Rabbi David Yosef, has once again spoken in a way that wounds women. Only last week he chose menacing language toward those seeking to sit for the rabbinate examinations (myself among them). He sought to cast aspersions on petitioning the High Court of Justice when a professional wrong with financial consequences occurs under the state’s auspices, and he added a threat that “soon we will hear” how women will be barred from the possibility of being examined. And this week, he chose to incite balaniot (the women who supervise the mikvehs) to shame the women who come to immerse at the mikveh.
Every evening, mikveh attendants (balaniot) and the women who come to immerse (tovlot) meet at the mikveh, and most of them manage to greet one another warmly, even when the dynamic between them is challenging for some. Anyone who has frequented the mikveh knows how sensitive a space it is, and how delicate a balance it demands: between the intimate life of each tovelet and her presence among other women; how differing outlooks learn to dwell together there; and how this space also makes room for consultations on difficult matters like fertility, protection from harm (muganut), and more. No woman comes to the mikveh to do battle, neither the balaniot nor the tovlot.
One who has never visited a mikveh during its operating hours will not understand the scene. One for whom the laws of immersion are theory, never enacted in his own body, never required to carry out all the stages of purification, may miss what actually unfolds there: what every woman for whom these laws are part of the rhythm of her life knows intimately, whether as one who observes them, as a halachic respondent, or as a balanit. Only someone outside these waters could suppose there is room to kindle an inner war between one woman and another. This is not Derech eretz and not the way of Torah; it is not the purpose of the words of the Beit Yosef and the Shulchan Aruch in placing a woman who can assist the tovelet.
A woman who immerses alone is in no way “raising a hand against the Torah” (merima yada ba-Torah). She is fulfilling a mitzvah for which she alone is responsible: “and she shall count for herself” (ve-safra lah). This is her mitzvah, and it holds meaning for her and for her husband. Each woman immerses in her own way, and another woman can “stand over her” (la’amod al gabbah) to confirm that there is no interposition (chatzitza) and that the immersion is complete and proper. But if a woman does not wish for this assistance, knows how she is to immerse in accordance with halacha, and there is no other technical difficulty, then she submerges fully into the water, and in a single instant her immersion is rendered valid (kasher).
The achievement of validating the option to immerse alone is one more achievement that grew out of a petition led by the ITIM organization (2015), which yielded a binding directive applying to all public mikvaot in Israel (2016). Thanks to the conversation we initiated in the “Advot” group (since 2010), a public discussion began; thanks to the petitioners who testified to their request to immerse without a balanit, “let us immerse in peace” (tnu litbol be-sheket); and thanks to the ongoing exchange in the Facebook group “Tovlot be-Nachat,” which we founded (2013) along the way. As a result, the matter now lives in the awareness of women, tovlot and balaniot alike, as part of the routine of immersion.
After years of volunteering as a balanit, I propose that balaniot ask, as a matter of course, every woman at the mikveh: “How can I help you?” Sometimes the answer is to offer room to breathe and not to be present; sometimes it is precisely to be present. The question itself places the power in the hands of the tovelet, and not the reverse.
And I suggest that tovlot calmly rehearse these sentences: “I have come to immerse. When I enter the immersion room I will signal you with the bell, but I do not need accompaniment. When I finish, I will signal you with the bell again. Thank you very much.”
Such an exchange reflects the understanding that at the mikveh, the center is the tovelet herself, and it can sustain the gracious atmosphere that prevails in the overwhelming majority of Israel’s mikvaot.
It must be remembered that for women who have endured sexual abuse, coming to the mikveh, with all the ritual that it entails, may reawaken trauma, even years later. The mitzvah of tevilah can become, for them, a moment of dread. And so the possibility of immersing in privacy is, at times, what makes fulfilling the mitzvah possible at all. When we ask a tovelet to submit to a presence she does not want, we cannot know what harm is done in the process. The sensitivity this calls for is a condition for the mikveh to remain a protected space.
The chief rabbi, Rabbi David Yosef, who draws his salary from public funds; the balaniot, who draw their salaries from public funds; and the mikvaot, maintained from public funds (and built, in part, through donations as well). All of these are answerable to the public. Conduct that cannot be reconciled with a state office of public service calls for the intervention of the professional echelons. Just last week Rabbi Yosef declared, with displeasure, that “on his watch” such-and-such would not happen (regarding the rabbinate exams).
This stands in stark contrast to the spirit of his words about his mission on the day he was elected to the office: “to magnify Torah and make it glorious, to increase Torah in Israel, to continue the path of my father and teacher, the crown of my head, in halacha and in leadership and in drawing near those who are far”. It seems that, instead of a welcoming countenance, the Ministry of Religious Services and the Chief Rabbinate are preoccupied with the trappings of power (serarah). Why keep stoking conflict, again and again, over conscription, kashrut, the halachic examinations, and the mikvaot? Would an establishment secure in itself spend its energy, at a time so steeped in hardship for a people at war, on fanning internal strife rather than helping to heal society? And what is the motive behind the announcement restoring robes (glimot) for Sephardi rabbis in the local councils? Is it to reinforce the external dimension of power, and to lend the air of a military order, with ranks distinguishing a local rabbi from a chief rabbi? It should not be so hard to tell the essential from the peripheral (ikar from tafel). Perhaps all this is rooted in a genuine apprehension over the bill that seeks, not without justification, to anchor in law a single chief rabbi for the state and to forestall the doubling of budgets, as though we lived in a climate in which an Ashkenazi decisor does not know Sephardi rulings, and the reverse.
Stirring up strife (chirchur madanim) is not a worthy trait, and to choose the side that denounces women walking in the hours of darkness in order to fulfill a mitzvah is nothing but a choice to erect a partition within the people of Israel, rather than to endear the way of Torah. About a month ago we, the petitioners in the matter of the women’s rabbinate examinations, were awarded 15,000 shekels in compensation from the Rabbinate, together with the Ministry of Religious Services and the examinations administration, on account of the humiliation and the verbal deceit (ona’at devarim) on the day of the exam, and for the legal labor required to extricate ourselves from the tangle.
I hope that we, as a public, will not need any comparable proceeding, and that matters will be set right in the ways of peace (darchei shalom). I hope, too, that the rabbi will soon retract his words and apologize. He would do well to remember that we are all attentive to him by virtue of his state office, and that service to the public does not depend on party or sectoral identity; and so we long to behold figures to whom it is good to lift our eyes, and from whom it is good to learn Torah together with Derech eretz.
