Listen to the Rain

It is a well-known fact that being Jewish is a result of being born to a Jewish mother, or converting. There are groups who don't adhere to this standard: I read a post from a Kaifeng Jew talking about how the Kaifeng Jews traced descent patrilineally--as he put it, for them descent was patriarchal, just like everything else in China--as do the Beta Yisrael of Ethiopia, and the American Reform Movement's official position is that a child needs to have one Jewish parent and be raised Jewish to qualify as Jewish. But theory is not always the same as practice. schoolpsychnerd's father was Jewish (the reason I lit a yahrzeit candle for him back in 2018) but her mother was Christian, and any number of times in a Reform setting she'd run into someone who would say she wasn't Jewish. You can change old traditions on paper, but it takes a much longer time for that change to actually be enacted by the community, and I didn't want Laila to feel out of place in a Jewish setting. Her level of observance will be up to her--maybe she'll cover her hair and demand separate plates when she visits us, and maybe she'll chow down on a delicious bacon cheeseburger during Yom Kippur--but I wanted to provide a place for her in the Jewish people. So, we went to the mikvah on Friday

When she heard what would happen, sashagee said it sounded like baptism, and my response was that the Christians got it from us. The mikvah represents a life transition--women will go after their periods or after giving birth, people go before they get married or become a b'nei mitzvah, and some people even go every Shabbat, maybe to prep for the extra soul we get that day. Laila went to mark her entry into the Jewish people, and as a baby she didn't have to go through most of the hurdles that stand in the way. The Talmud lists three requirements for conversion:

1. Circumcision for men.
   
2. Immersion in a mikvah before a beit din of three observant Jewish men.
   
3. A sacrifice at the Temple.

Nowadays, we obviously can't offer that sacrifice, and non-Orthodox Jews are mostly fine with women on the beit din (Members of which are usually rabbis today). Most converts have to undergo a long course of study, learning Jewish law, how to read Hebrew, and so on, but of course a baby doesn't need to spend hours studying Talmud beforehand. It's my job to make sure she knows all of that. She just needed to be in the water once, out of my hands, completely surrounded so that the water could touch every single part of her and bring her into her new life stage.

The time I saw her floating in the pool before the rabbis called out כשר‎ ( kasher, "Fit, correct") and I could scoop her up was the longest three seconds of my life, but once I picked her up, I recited the blessing for immersion in the mikvah, the Shema (suggested by Rabbi Lizzi), and the shehechayanu prayer for a transition in life, and then the beit din sang Siman Tov u'Mazel Tov ("Good omens and good fortune") and gave Laila her Hebrew name--בינה (binah, "Wisdom, understanding").


You're supposed to go for a festive meal after immersion in the mikvah, but we went out to Ethiopian food for Sigd on Thursday so we counted that. We went home and let Laila sleep, spent the day in a relaxed manner, went to services on Saturday morning, and then went home again. To Laila, it was just another day--but to me, it was the first step of passing down the tradition to her. Hopefully she'll want it.