Immersion: The Jewish Ritual Bath and the Media of Protestant Modernity

This essay is an ethnographic dip into the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath, which is most often associated with post-menstrual purity. The Modern Mikveh Movement (MMM), a grassroots effort to remake the mikveh into a tool to facilitate individual and communal transformation, has reappropriated mikveh as a ritual technology to gestate new forms of religious tradition. By immersing in the MMM’s multiple media, including classical Jewish rabbinic texts, bodies of water, and the sounds of musical performances, I use ancient media to reveal how Christian theology saturates scholarship on religion and science, enchantment, and media. Unlike the airy atmospheres  in which users of IMAX theaters or iPhones immerse, the mikveh is a corporally enveloping space that does not rely on sensory or cognitive illusion. At the heart of the bodily, affective experience of the MMM is entrance into the ever-cycling waters of a tradition and a community’s effervescent acts of care. The mikveh’s waters, in turn, soak through settled stories of religion and science cast in the molds of categories like belief or empiricism. By submerging in classical Jewish rabbinic texts and contemporary American women’s embodied practice, I convert the seemingly intractable set of propositions about religion and science as systems of faith and truth into more fluid, embodied practices. In doing so, this essay overflows the normative Protestant-inflected framings of both the field of religion and science and science and technology studies scholarship on new media.