In our community, there is a Marine Corps captain currently on yet another deployment to Afghanistan. He serves our country as both a soldier, and a medic and a firefighter. Every day of his deployment While he's deployed, he sees the devastating effects of war on children, women and the elderly. And every time he comes home, whether for a short visit or for an extended stay, he comes to immerse in our mikveh. The war, it seems, has had an effect on him, too. When asked about his mikveh practice, this Marine said, "When you put a rock with rough edges into a moving body of water, over time the water will smooth it. My life is filled with moving pieces. I use mikveh as a starting point for each major event that brings with it a certain level of fear. The mikveh grounds me. Sometimes it feels like the only thing I know how to do. The one thing I know how to prepare for."
In a recent column, a different community member described a spiritual void that many veterans face and wrote about the lack of rituals to enact a meaningful transition from military to civilian life. He suggested that soldiers coming back from war need a way to symbolically shed the terrors of war and to rejoin humanity. He mentioned that ancient cultures had rituals that could communally absorb an individual's pain.
In my work as director of a progressive and pluralist mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath, I see one of these ancient rituals every day. Tevila, the actual ritual that is performed in the mikveh, is a traditional Jewish practice of full body immersion in water. In a nutshell, it entails immersing three times, which together symbolize the past, the present and the future. These three immersions are a powerful way of marking transitions. One takes time to look back and consider one's journey so far, to feel grounded and present in the current moment, and to set an intention moving forward.
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