Immersion (tevillah) in a special pool of water (mikvah) is an ancient Jewish ritual act of purification. Rumors of personal healing through mikvah immersion are often presented as Jewish folklore or urban legends. Yet, my research shows that a surprising percentage of immersing respondents –both Orthodox and non-orthodox— have experienced mikvah immersion as either spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, or physically healing. My study investigates what it means to experience mikvah as healing; and whether these experiences correlate with other attitudes and personal practices that signal patterns in how Jews think about Self, purity, wellbeing, and healing. I conducted a survey (N=283) and 34 in-depth interviews in the United States, and an additional survey (N=239) in the United Kingdom –to determine how relevant the U.S. findings could be for the aspiring mikvah organization, Wellspring UK, that plans to incorporate mikvah as a central modality of care in a center for wellbeing in London. I interpret these findings through a ritual ecological analysis –integrating embodiment, ritual studies, history, and religious studies— that centers participants’ sensory-emotional descriptions of their immersion as centering and affirming, in the midst of personal suffering. I then seek to understand how immersers interpret these sensory experiences by framing their mikvah stories in the historical context of new conceptual constructs about body, self, wellbeing, healing, and purity that emerged from multiple Jewish engagements with the American Great Awakening (1960-1990). That sensory experiences of centering and affirmation are identified as healing reflects a holistic self-concept, observed among the majority of participants –immersers and non-immersers alike. Specifically, the contemporary Jewish self is a holistic body-self, integrating physical, spiritual, emotional, psychological, and relational aspects. Such holism means that upset in one aspect of the self produces difficulties in one or more of the other aspects. Thus, maintaining one’s sense of wellbeing requires continual balancing and rebalancing, a self-making project that dovetails with respondents’ high value for an emergent ideal of spiritual purity, defined as the alignment of one’s inner values with one’s outer speech and actions. Together, wellbeing and spiritual purity constitute an ideal state of radical shalom, as experienced during healing mikvah immersions.

Since the 1960’s and 1970’s, ethnographic research on Jewish menstrual rituals known as niddah, Taharat HaMishpacha, or Family Purity has associated their practices with religious behavior. Much of this research organizes around questions of women’s agency within ostensibly patriarchally constructed religious practices that carry the potential to oppress its women practitioners. This premise is built upon a number of implicit assumptions about the history of today’s niddah practices: that niddah is observed exclusively by Orthodox Jews; that increasing rates of niddah observance correlate exclusively with the trend toward stricter observance levels among the Orthodox since the 1960s; and that this increasingly strict observance itself reflects a reactionary trend among the Orthodox community (a.k.a. tradition versus modernity). All these assumptions currently circulate, in various degrees, among the American Jewish lay community and are shared by a significant number of congregational rabbis. Until the 1990s, no history of niddah existed to either support or refute these assumptions. I initially intended that this project would provide future ethnographers with a comprehensive history of niddah in America during the past one and a half centuries. I engaged Victor Turner’s theory of Social Drama as a framework for understanding this history as a socio-cultural process, rather than as a series of less than related events. However, this study h*as resulted in the identification of many more specific assumptions about the decline and revival of niddah observance in the twentieth century, which are not supported by the scant evidence available. These challenged assumptions beg new directions for research; a thorough reworking of the history of niddah in America; and a fresh look at the literature advocating niddah produced in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. This genealogy as Social Drama presents niddah in twentieth century America as undergoing periods of crisis, negotiation, and reintegration. This drama was triggered by late nineteenth century concepts of religion, body, and ritual that undermined and ruptured the integrity of niddah as a bodily religious ritual practice. Niddah’s twentieth century social drama culminated in fresh articulations of a unique Jewish sexuality and Jewish marital ethic.