Sadly, the chief rabbi, Rabbi David Yosef, has once again spoken in a way that wounds women. Only last week he chose menacing language toward those seeking to sit for the rabbinate examinations (myself among them). He sought to cast aspersions on petitioning the High Court of Justice when a professional wrong with financial consequences occurs under the state’s auspices, and he added a threat that “soon we will hear” how women will be barred from the possibility of being examined. And this week, he chose to incite balaniot (the women who supervise the mikvehs) to shame the women who come to immerse at the mikveh.

Every evening, mikveh attendants (balaniot) and the women who come to immerse (tovlot) meet at the mikveh, and most of them manage to greet one another warmly, even when the dynamic between them is challenging for some. Anyone who has frequented the mikveh knows how sensitive a space it is, and how delicate a balance it demands: between the intimate life of each tovelet and her presence among other women; how differing outlooks learn to dwell together there; and how this space also makes room for consultations on difficult matters like fertility, protection from harm (muganut), and more. No woman comes to the mikveh to do battle, neither the balaniot nor the tovlot.

One who has never visited a mikveh during its operating hours will not understand the scene. One for whom the laws of immersion are theory, never enacted in his own body, never required to carry out all the stages of purification, may miss what actually unfolds there: what every woman for whom these laws are part of the rhythm of her life knows intimately, whether as one who observes them, as a halachic respondent, or as a balanit. Only someone outside these waters could suppose there is room to kindle an inner war between one woman and another. This is not Derech eretz and not the way of Torah; it is not the purpose of the words of the Beit Yosef and the Shulchan Aruch in placing a woman who can assist the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)