Immersion

“Baruch atah, HaShem, Eloheinu, melech ha'olam, asher kideshanu b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu al ha'tevillah.”

The teacher doesn’t speak English. Ever. Our Ulpan consists of learning Hebrew in Hebrew. I feel like I am drowning, and I know I am standing in a mere puddle.

Learning the Hebrew language, as several HUC professors have promised our incoming class, will be the key to unlocking the beauty and richness of Jewish tradition. I began studying Hebrew just last year, first in a short, relatively informal course on Biblical Hebrew and then in a frantically focused course in Modern Hebrew with one goal in mind: passing the HUC Hebrew proficiency exam. I passed, with flying colors no less, but I did not immerse myself in the sounds and the rhythms of Hebrew. In fact, I did just the opposite of what traditional Jewish learning calls for: I buried my nose in a book, turned only to reading and writing, and ignored the physical and the communal. We spoke little in class and I didn’t seek out opportunities to listen to Hebrew as an everyday language.

Now I am called to immerse myself in Hebrew, both inside the classroom and in the ocean of language that is Jerusalem: the crowded covered lanes of the shuk on a Friday morning, when everyone is preparing for Shabbat dinner; the noisy bar in the German Colony where young people from all over the world drink and play and converse in cadences I have yet to grasp; the Israeli radio station with its eclectic mix of world music and politically sharp lyrics; the home of a Jerusalemite family who invites HUC students to lively Shabbat dinners. And the classroom, where the questions and the answers are in a modern language that reaches back to an ancient past.

I was drowning, and then I thought about immersion.

In Hebrew, there the verb root “taval” means “ to immerse.” In the ritual of tevillah (literally “an immersing” or “immersion”), Jews visit the mikveh (ritual bath) each week in preparation for Shabbat. One practices tevillah before entering marriage and upon converting to Judaism, among other purposes for the mikveh. It is a ritual of purification and a means of marking the transition between one state and another, between one point in time and another, between stages of life.

But there is also “tavah”: “to drown” or “to sink.”

This week, I have feared drowning, and it led me to fear the immersion itself. But “tavah” also means “to seal,” “to imprint,” or “to stamp.”

In the mikveh, the body falls beneath the surface. Floating, we are surrounded by mayim chayim, living waters, flowing from a natural source and gathering into a pool that can embrace us in our entirety. I want my Hebrew study to be an immersion that changes me, brings me from one state to another, from the mundane to the holy. An immersion need not be a drowning, but we cannot be imprinted, affected by Hebrew, without at least getting into the water.

“Blessed are you, HaShem (The Name), our god, sovereign of the universe, who makes us holy with his mitzvot and commands us concerning the immersion.”