UNITED STATES
The Jewish Daily Forward
By Danya Ruttenberg
Yesterday, prominent Modern Orthodox Rabbi Barry Freundel was arrested on charges of voyeurism. The police report obtained by the media indicates that he had used cameras to record women showering as they prepared to use the mikveh.
Freundel should, and will, have his say in court. These charges are serious, though, and there are implications to the fact that this allegedly took place in the mikveh, of all places.
The mikveh is sacred space. All of it, including the rooms in which women prepare to immerse. The act of preparation is, in fact, part of the ritual. And the profound, complex, and deeply personal feelings that can be part of mikveh immersion can manifest in the preparation room as well as in the water itself.
Picture a woman returning to the mikveh for the first time after a miscarriage. She’s swimming in grief, still, maybe. Judaism doesn’t traditionally have a formal ritual to mark the loss of a pregnancy — except the mikveh. Her first immersion after first a time of hope, and then one of what’s all too often an unnamed bereavement is her ritual to mark what’s happened inside her body and her heart, everything she’s feeling and everything that’s different now.
Now picture a woman coming back to the mikveh after her third miscarriage.
Now picture a woman coming to the mikveh once again, despite months or years of trying to conceive, and the ways in which that ritual space holds her frustrations, pain, questions, grief, anger, letting go, not letting go.
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