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July/August 2008—A Jewish Life

Anita Diamant

a Mikveh of Her Own

The queen of Jewish lifecycle books and author of the best-selling The Red Tent is the founder of the world’s first freestanding pluralistic mikveh.

By nadine epstein

Thankfully, Anita Diamant does not sigh when I ask her the question she has been asked countless times. She smiles graciously, accustomed to fielding inquiries about The Red Tent, one of the first contemporary novels to transcend the patriarchal lens of the Bible. Her magnum opus has sold three million copies since its 1997 publication, a staggering number not just in the world of Jewish books—where sales success is usually defined in the range of five to ten thousand—but by any measure. We are sitting on the patio of her small, sunny backyard in Newton, Massachusetts. Like others who have read The Red Tent, I can’t wait to talk to her about her vivid portrait of the Biblical women who, in her telling, made up the heart and soul of Jacob’s prosperous clan: Dinah, Jacob’s only daughter by Leah; Leah herself; Rachel, her rival for Jacob’s affections; and their sister-handmaidens, Zilpah and Bilhah. Thus the oft-repeated question: Was there really such a thing among our ancient foremothers as a red tent?

“The daily lives of women were rarely recorded, so the notion of The Red Tent and what happens in it was my invention,” Diamant answers. As she envisioned it, the eponymous shelter was an ancient “room of her own,” off limits to men, where women bled over straw strewn on the ground during childbirth and the full moon. “We do know there were menstrual tents and huts all over the pre-modern world,” Diamant adds.

Diamant’s fame may derive from The Red Tent, but it would be unwise to define her by that alone. Now 57, she has devoted much of her adult life to expanding Judaism’s boundaries to embrace women, converts and other Jews longing to connect with their religion. Before she tried her hand at fiction, she was the queen of modern Jewish lifecycle books. In the years since, she has become one of the leaders of the modern mikveh renaissance, blending spiritual connection with action by founding Mayyim Hayyim, an innovative, pluralistic freestanding mikveh and educational center—the first of its kind—on the main drag here in Newton.

“She has made sacred tradition accessible to whole generations to whom Judaism would have remained a closed book,” says author Larry Kushner, her friend and former rabbi. “One cannot imagine liberal Judaism today without her oeuvre.”

 

“I grew up in Philip Roth’s Newark, right before it stopped being Philip Roth’s Newark,” Diamant says. She is speaking of the New Jersey city’s fabled Golden Age from 1930 to 1960, during which 75,000 Jews clustered in neighborhoods like Weequahic, where she lived. “I was surrounded by Jewish kids,” she recalls. “I remember going to school on Rosh Hashanah and almost nobody else was there.”

Her parents, Holocaust survivors, were not religious. Yet “we were very Jewish, very ethnic, very proud, with Yiddish and lots of languages spoken,” she says. As a child, Diamant equated Judaism and Democratic politics. “No one ever explicitly told me this, but I knew that to be Jewish was to be politically progressive.” It wasn’t until the family moved to Denver and joined a large Reform congregation that Diamant learned more about her religion.

In 1975, after studying literature in college and graduate school, Diamant moved to Boston and drifted into journalism, writing articles for The Boston Globe and The Boston Phoenix and other publications. She fell in love with Jim Ball, a Protestant. When they decided to get married, they met with Kushner, then rabbi of Congregation Beth El, a small, intellectual, egalitarian Reform synagogue in nearby Sudbury. Under Kushner’s tutelage, Ball converted in 1982.

After their marriage, the couple threw themselves into studying Judaism. Ball worked in public relations while Diamant delved into Jewish ritual, forging a writing career that eventually encompassed volumes reaching from birth to death. Her first foray was The New Jewish Wedding, a step-by-step marriage guide published in 1985. “I don’t remember this,” says Kushner, “but Anita says she was inspired to write the wedding book when she and Jim came to my office to tell me they wanted to get married. Anita says she asked, ‘What should we read?’ and I looked at the bookshelf, pointed at her and said, ‘You should write a book about Jewish weddings.’”

The birth of her daughter Emilia in 1985 led to The New Jewish Baby Book, a guide to customs and rituals for welcoming a child into the world, published in 1988. “Rabbi Kushner showed me that in order to be a serious Jew, I do not have to be a scholar—only a student,” Diamant says in Pitching My Tent, a collection of linked personal essays that came out in 2003. As her life progressed and her understanding of Judaism evolved, the books that followed included Living a Jewish Life—an introduction to cultural and spiritual traditions ranging from how to hang a mezuzah to choosing the right synagogue—which Diamant co-authored in 1991; Choosing a Jewish Life: A Handbook for People Converting to Judaism and for their Family and Friends, in 1997; and Saying Kaddish in 1999, prompted by the death of her father. Finally, in 2000, came How to Be a Jewish Parent, currently being reissued under the title How to Raise a Jewish Child.

“If there is a shulchan aruch (codification of Jewish law) for liberal Jews,” says Kushner, now scholar-in-residence at Temple Emanuel in San Francisco, “she is the author.”

 

While researching her book for converts, Diamant decided to challenge herself by writing a novel. She began by mulling over the complex feelings that must have existed between Rachel and Leah, who competed for Jacob’s attention yet had to cooperate to raise a large shared family. Her curiosity was whetted by Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which Woolf muses that relationships between fictitious women are too simple. “Cleopatra did not like Octavia,” Woolf writes. “How interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated.” Diamant studied the relevant Biblical passages but couldn’t devise a way to dramatize Jacob’s wives’ relationship. “So I kept reading and bumped against the Dinah story,” she says. Nearly invisible, Dinah is mentioned only once in the Torah, in a few tragic sentences in Genesis 34: “Out went Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she bore to Jacob, to see the girls of the land. Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, Prince of the Land, saw her. He took her, he lay with her, and he degraded her.”

Jewish texts have long debated whether this constituted rape. The Torah tells us that Shechem wanted to marry Dinah. Her brothers grant permission on the condition that Shechem and the men of his tribe undergo circumcision. Then, as they writhe in pain from the ritual, Dinah’s vengeful brothers slaughter Shechem and the males of his family.

“It’s very dramatic,” says Diamant, “full of sex and death and greed and sibling rivalry.” In particular, the story appealed to her because, since Dinah herself never speaks, readers have no idea what she feels. “I found Dinah’s silence to be a great open door—thanks to Woolf and many other feminist writers who pointed out that there was a door,” says Diamant. “So I gave her a voice.”

In anointing Dinah the novel’s narrator, Diamant created a footnote to history in glorious Technicolor. Diamant modestly insists she was far from the first late 20th-century author to cast a feminist net into Biblical texts. “All kinds of Jewish women have been grappling with this, challenging men to think and write differently,” says Diamant. “The Red Tent is part of a much bigger phenomenon of women publishing and thinking. It wouldn’t exist without this choir.”

This choir began to sing in the 1960s, as women questioned their second-class status in Judaism, says Judith Plaskow, author of the 1990 Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. “A lot of women involved in feminism were Jewish and they brought their feminist eyes to Judaism,” she says. “They began to see Torah as the record of male experience. They pointed out that there had been a conversation about Jewish texts for over 2,000 years from which women had been excluded.”

By the 1980s, women had begun to turn out midrashim—stories and commentaries through which rabbis and scholars elaborate on a Biblical narrative to fill in details and find relevance, creating whole scenes and conversations. “Women asked, ‘What is missing?’” says Plaskow. “‘Where are the women? What are they doing? What is their perspective?’”

Says Carolyn Hessel, director of the Jewish Book Council: “Biblical midrash is one of the beauties of Jewish literature in that it talks to each of us every day of our lives, and Anita Diamant took it to another level and adapted it to our times.”

Critics of Diamant’s novel say it strays too far from the text to be midrash. Some Orthodox readers take offense at Biblical figures that reek and bleed, despite the fact that the Torah rarely covers up human frailties. Yet, Diamant doesn’t consider the book’s characters even to be Jewish, as they live in an era before Jewish law and most practice polytheism; Each of the women in The Red Tent favors a different ancient Sumerian goddess. And Diamant certainly doesn’t think of the book as midrash: “It is a novel—that’s what it says on the cover.”

But Rabbi Elyse Goldstein argues that The Red Tent has become midrash. “It’s now in the canon of text that we use to teach the story of Dinah,” says Goldstein, author of four books about a feminist approach to Jewish texts, including the forthcoming New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future. “Wherever I teach, someone raises her hand and says something based on The Red Tent.” It also, she says, fulfills the mission of midrash because it has “encouraged people to go back and read the actual text and engage more creatively and personally with the Torah narrative.”

Diamant’s recent fiction likewise pursues the theme of women’s friendship and bonds and the creation of what Erich Neumann—a psychologist, writer and student of Carl Jung—called a “sacred feminine precinct.”

Her 2002 novel, Good Harbor, set in the seaside town of Gloucester on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, is a contemporary story of two Jewish women and their healing friendship. (“It’s a Jewish novel, although it wasn’t seen that way,” she says.) It was followed by The Last Days Of Dogtown. (“It takes place in New England in the 1820s and 1830s, and has no Jews at all.”)

While writing these novels, Diamant was also pursuing a non-literary dream involving another largely “sacred feminine precinct:” the mikveh. The first time she visited a mikveh was a week and a half before her wedding, when her husband-to-be immersed in the “living waters” that symbolically return converts to a spiritually newborn state.

For much of the Jewish diaspora, mikvehs were constructed before synagogues, a sign of their great importance. They were needed so women could meet the requirements of niddah: According to rules set out in Leviticus, a married couple must abstain from sex during a woman’s menses, which includes seven additional “clean days.” The wife is commanded to immerse in a mikveh before the couple can resume relations. The commandment affects only women, who are also required to immerse before marriage. Men are not required to purify themselves before sex, but they can and do immerse in mikvehs. (The ancient requirement that they do so before entering the Temple was set aside after the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 AD.)

Yet mikvehs never fully caught on in the United States. “American Jews rejected mikvehs for a very long time,” says Diamant. “Even in Orthodox communities, it was more lip service. My hunch is that the mikvehs weren’t so great in the old countries and women said, ‘Honey, build schools first.’” Mikvehs that did exist, whether the unhygienic tanks of the early 19th century or modern tiled “ritualariums” built in the 1930s, were constructed for neither looks nor convenience. “By 1942, the Committee on Traditional Observance of the Rabbinic Council of America declared the practice of monthly purification ‘on the verge of extinction,’” according to Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present by Hasia R. Diner and Beryl Lieff Benderly.

But, as conversions began to increase in the past 30 years, this dearth of mikvehs became a problem. Since many existing ones were connected to Orthodox synagogues, it was particularly hard to find mikvehs where non-Orthodox rabbis could perform conversions.

The mikveh Jim Ball used was in an old house. To reach it, prospective converts had to walk through the kitchen, past the washing machine and dryer and down a back corridor to a haphazardly constructed room with a vanity desk and hair dryers. “It was almost surreal,” says Kushner, who was a member of the rabbinical beit din that witnessed Ball’s conversion. “I remember having to warn future converts not to get concerned about how strange this experience would be.”

Despite the surroundings, Diamant recalls that, when her husband-to-be emerged from the water, she was struck by how deeply he had been moved by the experience. “The immersion ritual—getting naked and getting into water—is such an elemental experience.”

This experience stayed in her mind when she began work in 1995 on her conversion guide, Choosing a Jewish Life. To research it, Diamant accompanied Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis when they brought converts to mikvehs and didn’t like what she saw. “I was there one day when there was a line out the door. The mikveh should be a place for reflection and celebration, but there was no time, that day, for any of those people to meditate or sing,” she wrote in Pitching My Tent. “There was no way for the assembled rabbis to lead each of those new Jews through a thoughtful, personal ritual. And afterward, there was nothing to do but get back in the car. As if it were no big deal to change your identity, alter your family constellation, and transform the Jewish people forever.”

“I want a mikveh,” she wrote. “Not my own, personal mikveh in the backyard, but a community mikveh that I can call my own.”

Thus was born the idea of building a local mikveh in which rabbis of all Jewish denominations could perform conversions with room for celebration and educational programs. Although the local Jewish community supported the idea, Barry Shrage, president of Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, told Diamant that the only way to make it happen would be for her to use the power of The Red Tent to attract people to the project. She took his advice, building a partnership among local Jewish groups. With the help of the women of The Red Tent, Mayyim Hayyim, Hebrew for “living waters,” opened its doors in 2004.

 

Visually, Mayyim Hayyim is a far cry from American mikvehs of old. A quaint New England house containing an educational center, art gallery and celebratory space, it also features a modern addition with two mikvehs and four prep rooms. The annex has soaring ceilings with skylights, natural wood and gold tile that has the look and feel of Jerusalem stone. Its architecture has an organic, sacred feel.

“It is built with intention and respect and kavanah [honor] and high aesthetic values,” says Diamant as she shows me around. “This is one way we express our spirituality and are moved spiritually. It’s not trivial and not incidental and not idolatrous. It’s hidur mitzvah [going above and beyond halachic requirements]. And it matters.”

The uniqueness of Mayyim Hayyim goes beyond its structural features. Mayyim Hayyim is at the forefront of a revolution that transcends the traditional pursuit of “cleanliness” and focuses instead on spiritual connection. Diamant, executive director Aliza Kline—whom she credits with bringing Mayyim Hayyim to life—and their trained attendants welcome Jews of all beliefs, including women who are single, divorced or past menopause, not always welcome at Orthodox mikvehs.

Over the last four years, 2,800 Jews have immersed in Mayyim Hayyim’s pools, some of them many times. Diamant enumerates the myriad reasons that draw them: “People come to celebrate lifecycle events—birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, b’nai mitzvahs. They come after breast and prostate cancer treatment. They come facing death and after the year of saying kaddish. Widows come when they take off their wedding rings and are ready to find a new partner in life. People come after breakups. They come when they have outlived their parents. One 82-year-old gentleman came because he just wanted to have the experience. He said: ‘I’m Jewish and I have never done this and I want to try it.’ So he did.”

Even Orthodox Jews come for rituals outside the prescribed ones. “After a miscarriage, a wife immersed and her husband was actually her witness,” says Diamant. “It was their loss and they needed a way to ritually mark the ending of something and the beginning of something new.”

In building Mayyim Hayyim, Diamant became a pioneer of what has become a full-fledged mikveh revival, much the way she helped to advance feminist interpretations of the Bible. She did not start the conversation: Theologians like Rachel Adler, professor of modern Jewish thought and Judaism and Gender at Hebrew Union College and the University of Southern California, and Elyse Goldstein were among the first to reframe immersion to mark events for which no ritual existed.

Although Mayyim Hayyim remains the only independent pluralistic mikveh, its existence has helped spur increased interest in Reform and Conservative mikvehs. Mayyim Hayyim, playing the role of mikveh Johnny Appleseed, has co-sponsored a mikveh ritual conference, offered educational programs and begun assisting other communities—from El Paso in Texas to a kibbutz in Arava in Israel—to transform, expand and build mikvehs.

 

The fact that women have begun to reclaim the mikveh in ways that strengthen their spiritual connection—and the continuing popularity of The Red Tent—attests to the hunger women have to better relate to Judaism. “This is nothing radical,” says Diamant. “To me, feminism is the notion that women are human beings and is part of the notion of bzetelem elohim—we are all made in the image of God—and that there is a multiplicity of divine.”

Yet Diamant does not see herself returning to the world of women’s Biblical fiction, a genre she is credited with helping to create. Since The Red Tent was published, book stores have been flooded with novels on Sarah, Rebecca, King David’s wife Michal, Esther, Miriam and Zippora, as well as Rachel and Leah. Diamant admits to not having read any of them. “I was exhausted by The Red Tent,” she says. “After I had done it, I really didn’t want to do it again. I don’t see how I could do it again without that same wide-eyed curiosity.

“Believe me, my publishers would love The Red Tent Two, Daughter of Red Tent and Son of Red Tent.” Instead, Diamant is now treading different feminine territory by writing a novel revolving around four women in Palestine’s British-run Atlit refugee camp for Jews right after World War II.

Diamant resists the impulse to focus too much on the ancient past. “I am bemused by the nostalgia some women have for the world of The Red Tent,” she tells me. “I wouldn’t want to live in that world. There’s no going back.”

The author would prefer that women appreciate what they have. “It’s a terrific time to be a Jewish woman,” she says. “Feminism has been remarkably successful in transforming Jewish culture, Jewish life, Jewish thinking and Jewish studies in America. There’s plenty far to go; we’re not done. But it’s stunning how much we’ve changed things, and how much things are changed for the better.”

Diamant’s sea blue eyes flash. We have touched on the bedrock that underlies all of her work: Her excitement that women’s intellect and creativity have become an expression of Judaism’s vitality and a guarantee of its future.

“Jewish feminism has all kinds of implications that we won’t know about for a long time, but there are more voices, more insights about everything, different ways of doing things,” she tells me. “It’s a rich bumper crop, thanks to the seeds that women have planted and cultivated. I’m mixing so many metaphors, I apologize, but you know it’s a very fertile time.”