by Becca Shimshak “For the Jews, there was light, happiness, joy and honor; so it should be for us.” ~Esther 8:16 with quote from prayer for Havdalah When I got married ten years ago, I chose this quote for our wedding invitation. For all of our friends, there were big, beautiful weddings. Hotels, tuxedos, cute flower […]
Continue Readingby Carrie Bornstein If you know about the mikveh, you’re probably aware that there are any number of reasons why a person might feel, well, less than comfortable with the idea. Let’s be honest here – the mikveh is not our easiest of rituals. Some people have anxiety about water, or with nudity, for that […]
Continue Readingby Donna Leventhal As a member of the Mayyim Hayyim Art Committee, I am excited to introduce our “Vessels” year-long show. From September-January, “Vessels: Containing Possibilities” showcased the Raku vases of and mosaic art. Opening this Thursday and continuing through June is “Vessels: Holiness in Hand,” featuring work by glass blower Christopher Watts and porcelain […]
Continue Readingby DeDe Jacobs-Komisar, Development Manager Living in the Boston area, it’s hard to think about anything these days besides snow. It’s hard to believe that just twenty days ago it had only snowed five inches the entire season; now we’re buried in a collective snowfall of more than six feet that has wreaked havoc on all […]
Continue Readingby Pamela Cole My first visit to Mayyim Hayyim was a beautiful May evening in 2014. I was on a ‘field trip’ with my Pathways to Judaism class and we were being introduced to what would mark the final step of our conversion process. It wasn’t the first time I had heard of Mayyim Hayyim, though. […]
Continue Readingby Tamara Reese This article originally appeared on kveller.com I had hoped for a mikveh immersion at the end of my first pregnancy. I wanted the ritual waters to embrace me as a soon-to-be mother as openly as they had to Judaism and to marriage. I had dreamed of how I wanted every aspect of […]
Continue Readingby Andie Insoft, Mikveh Guide Just a “few” years ago, when I was a teenager, if someone had told me that I would someday be a mikveh guide, I would have said they were absolutely crazy. I grew up in a fairly traditional, Conservative, Jewish home. We kept kosher, attended services (at least 3 times […]
Continue Readingby Carrie Bornstein Last week I had the fortune of teaching a group of undergrads at Harvard Hillel and we spent some time looking at texts on the power of water. In addition to the waters of creation when God separated the heaven from the waters of the earth, we also explored waters of destruction […]
Continue Readingby Rabbi Jenny Solomon Where is your “happy place?” Some people picture themselves on a sunlit beach. Others have a favorite niche in their homes. Still others conjure up a vacation destination that holds warm memories and sacred traditions. But what if your “happy place” was also your “sad place,” your “worried place,” your “gratitude […]
Continue Readingby Walt Clark, Office Assistant I remember a few years ago, a friend of mine signed up to be a Couchsurfing host. Couchsurfing.com is a website where people offer up their homes to travelers. Over the course of that summer I got talk to a lot people from all corners of the globe. One evening, I was barbecuing […]
Continue Readingby Rabbi Jaclyn Cohen I first breathed the words “mikveh,” “maybe,” and “going to” my third year of rabbinical school at HUC-JIR, the Reform Movement’s seminary. Well-intentioned classmates and friends – whom I admire and adore – were surprised. Some were skeptical. Their reactions were likely born from the same source as my own misgivings about mikveh: […]
Continue Readingby DeDe Jacobs-Komisar, Development Manager Things were kind of noisy during the past few weeks here at Mayyim Hayyim. We brought in contractors to redo all of the floor tiling on the wet side downstairs. When Mayyim Hayyim was originally built about a decade ago, the design included lovely, big squares of wood paneling amidst […]
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