By Isobel-Marie Johnston
TEMPE, Arizona — The mid-life journey that led me back to college began in the mikvah. I had been observing the laws of Niddah (aka “Family Purity” or Taharat haMishpacha) for about six years when this immersion initiated a series of changes that brings me to where I am today. The night of this immersion (momentous only in retrospect), I had been struggling with post-partum hip pain for about a year and a half that no amount of physical therapy or chiropractic treatments was fixing. This night, the pain was unusually bad as I limped sideways down the mikvah steps. The attendant asked with clear concern in her voice, “Do you need help?” I said, “No, it only hurts”. But stairs had never hurt that bad.
In the water, I silently begged God, “Please, take away my pain,” holding this simple prayer as I went under the surface. When I emerged from the water, my mood had shifted. Again, the attendant asked, “Are you all right? You seem so sad.” Sad. Yes, that was the word for it. Sad. And I stayed sad like that for two full days. But my pain was gone. When the sadness cleared, it was like the song “I can see clearly now the rain is gone.” I saw that I had been putting up with treatment from others that I should never have tolerated. One by one, I worked through these relationships, salvaging, and reorienting those that could be changed and cutting myself off from those that couldn’t.
One such relationship involved someone whose criticisms of me ran so deep they had become the voice of my inner-critic. When these thoughts returned, so did my pain. As I pushed these thoughts away, the pain dissipated. This trained me quit this pattern of thinking. During this process of revising my relationships, my husband constructively observed, “I just don’t think you’re cut out to be a stay-at-home mom. You need to get out, get a job, do anything.” I took that seriously and determined that a full career shift was needed: from the English-Language-Arts-teacher-who-doesn’t-like-reading-fiction to study and teach the topic that had interested me since age 12: religion.
Applying to graduate school meant I needed a solid direction for proposed research. I turned to Niddah/Taharat haMishpachah for my subject; my journals and notebooks suggested my interest in this topic would have the durability and traction needed for the long haul of grad school. Through both my armchair research and personal experience as a lay practitioner, I understood that a lot was going on here that had not been considered outside of religious literature. The cycles of separation-mikvah-reunion weave themselves into the ups and downs of marriage, pregnancy, loss, childbirth, and the ordinary month-to-month movements of living, making for an intensely rich, yet relatively untapped terrain for scholarship.
Finding a school that would support researching Niddah from both the interdisciplinary and lived experience perspectives that I believed this topic needed proved to be a challenge. Anthropology departments said, “That topic is heavily religious; go talk to the Religious Studies department.” Religious Studies departments said, “You’re talking about doing ethnography, go talk to the Anthropology departments.” Of the schools I looked at, only Arizona State University’s School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies offered a joint track in the Anthropology of Religion, with faculty whose work in ritual studies would support studying Niddah on its own terms as a set of religious rituals.
While researching my master’s thesis, I began to suspect that there might be something of a sleeper Niddah community in the United States, that is: women who do practices around their periods associated with Niddah, but who did not identify themselves as in anyway Niddah-observant and had not immersed in a mikvah. In 2018, I conducted an anonymous pilot study in the Greater Phoenix area exploring this possibility and the results suggested this may in fact be part of the American Jewish landscape.
In that same survey, out of sheer personal curiosity, I added one question asking participants if they had ever experienced emotional, spiritual, psychological, or physical healing through mikvah. This question caught the attention of then director of Rising Tides Open Water Mikvah Network, who shared with me that a community in the United Kingdom had asked if any hard data on healing through mikvah existed; suggesting this question might have much wider relevance than I supposed. Then the results of the pilot survey supported taking these experiences seriously. And thus, my dissertation research was redirected to mikvah and healing.
The pilot study size was too small to do more than suggest that certain questions merited further study on a larger scale (confidence level of only 85.41%). This month, I am launching an expanded study (access here) open to all Jewish adults (over 18) and non-Jewish intimate partners of Jews in the United States of America and Canada.
The research questions:
- Do the patterns identified in the 2018 pilot study appear elsewhere across the wider U.S. and Canadian Jewish communities?
- How might (or might not) the different ways of thinking about body, spirit/soul, health and various ways of living with our bodies as Jews, or as partners of Jews, factor into such patterns?
The survey questions:
- General Jewish ritual life (14 questions),
- Niddah and mikvah experiences (16 questions),
- Secular body-centered practices (14 questions), and
- Demographics (11 questions).
Despite the mikvah angle, this anonymous survey needs people of all observance levels to participate. While the survey will give a richly detailed view of Jewish ritual life today, it is long; but you can exit and return to complete the survey at a pace that works for your schedule, between now and March 20, 2021.
This survey breaks ground on several levels:
- First formal study to ask men about their experiences with Family Purity/Niddah.
- Sets to comprehensively learn about Jewish ritual life across all branches and identities within U.S. and Canadian Jewish communities.
- The results of this survey, and its follow-up study about how Jews think about their bodies, spirits, and ritual are expected to contribute new insights into larger patterns of disaffiliation and reaffiliation across the religious landscapes of the U.S.A. and Canada, including the rapidly growing demographic of religious “Nones” and the “Spiritual-but-not-religious” (SBNRs).
The results of this expanded survey will help me understand better where and how to focus more qualitative personal-level research such as interviews, focus groups, or collecting personal narratives. Participants are invited to sign-up for follow-up research either in the survey or by emailing me directly. I also encourage local and national Jewish organizations who find this information useful for educational curricula, event programming, or support services, etc… to connect with me to participate to their comfort zone: from receiving reports on the findings, to asking questions of the anonymous raw data, or participating in organizing follow-up research. It is important to me that my research stays anchored to the interests of Jewish communities. I can’t do that without you.
If you are interested in participating in this study or want more information, please contact me via ijohnst2@asu.edu
or go directly to the survey via this website.
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Isobel-Marie Johnston is a doctoral candidate in religious studies and a faculty associate in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.