Mikveh Dreaming

by Rabbi Haviva Ner-David, Shmaya: A Mikveh for Mind, Body and Soul, on Kibbutz Hannaton

Water is my element. I feel most at peace and alive in water. I live with a degenerative genetic muscular disease, a form of muscular dystrophy called FSHD, so it is only in water that I feel able to move freely and safely. It is in water that I feel most at home.

My daily swim is a spiritual practice. So is my monthly full-body mikveh immersion when my menstrual cycle ends. And so is my yearly swim and full body immersion in the Sea of Galilee during the annual Kinneret Swim between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Mikveh is also one venue for my rabbinic expression. I am the founding rabbi at a mikveh, a ritual immersion pool, in the Galilee: Shmaya: A Mikveh for Mind, Body and Soul. I help create personalized immersion ceremonies and officiate them as well. Accompanying others as we create their kavanot (sacred intentions) for their mikveh ceremonies, and being present (either in the same or next room, or in another place entirely – even across seas!) for them as they experience rebirth, renewal, rejuvenation, and re-centering, is a privilege that moves me every time I am asked to do so.

Ordained and certified at the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary, I am also a spiritual director with a specialty in working with dreams. It is not surprising, then, that mikveh and water have appeared in my dreams in various shapes and forms since I began paying attention.

Raised in an Orthodox Jewish home and close-knit religious community, I never felt I fit in with the collective or a particularist approach, nor did I find that the restrictive, highly structured lifestyle suited or was healthy for me. But my soul longed for meaning and connection, and Orthodox Judaism was the only way I knew to God, the only way I knew to be spiritual. I became an Orthodox feminist fighting for women’s rights within Orthodoxy. I started praying with tallit and tefillin – something only men in the Orthodox world did – and I co-founded a series of Orthodox prayer communities where women could lead services and read from the Torah scroll. I was even the first woman to be ordained publicly by an Orthodox rabbi. But that only appeased my soul temporarily.

I began calling myself a post-denominational rabbi, but even started to question whether Judaism was the only place to find the answers I was seeking. I felt a calling to explore multiple Truths and was drawn to interspirituality, which is when I enrolled at the One Spirit Seminary to study for interfaith ordination. It was during my time at One Spirit that I met Gestalt psychologist, spiritual director, teacher and dreamworker Judith Schafman and was exposed to the notion that our dreams are sacred messages from our souls. Jude invited us to start keeping a dream journal and bring to her any dreams that felt especially significant.

***

I am officiating a ceremony at Shmaya: A Mikveh for Mind, Body and Soul. It is the conversion of a baby to Judaism. When I approach the mikveh with the family, we realize that there is no water in the mikveh. It has disappeared! I convince the family to come back after I refill the mikveh. But when we return, water is pouring out of the building: the windows, the door. It’s flowing down the path, overflowing into and flooding the whole kibbutz. People are being lifted and carried away.

I had this dream the night after I met Jude. Jude’s method of dreamwork involves giving voice to the various dream elements – the idea being that each aspect of your dream is a piece of your unconscious. Nothing in the dream is there by accident. Every image, word, character, and feeling was carefully selected by your unconscious to appear to you in your sleeping state with a message from your soul.

When I worked this dream with Jude, she had me speak as the water. It became clear to me that through the water images I had created in my dream, I was expressing a need to return to my most essential, most pure, most core self – stripped away of layers of social conditioning and baggage – and return as water overflowing the boundaries of the mikveh. And when she had me speak as the baby floating away instead of being converted to Judaism, I was able to let go of fear and calmly float away, trusting in the water to carry me where I needed to be carried spiritually, even if that meant breaking out of clear religious boundaries. Yet, I did not understand how to apply these messages practically in my life.

But as Jude explained, a dream is like a knock on the door. If you have recurring themes in your dreams, or if your dreams get increasingly vivid or even startling, think of it as a louder and louder knock. Your unconscious will keep knocking until you open that door. Your soul refuses to be silenced.

Then I had this dream:

I am walking with my friend, who is on the kibbutz synagogue committee, on the way to services on Friday night. It was my turn to wash the synagogue floor this week. Now we are going there ahead of everyone else to set up. When we get to the synagogue, we see the building is in a cage with a bicycle lock on the front door. Water is streaming out of the windows, doors and through the bars of the cage. The walls themselves are melting and flowing through the bars!

“I guess I forgot to turn off the faucet,” I say to my friend. “My mistake. I am so sorry.”

I woke up with that powerful image of the synagogue walls melting, transforming into water, and then streaming out through the bars of the cage, which, I knew, was erected by me, since this is my dream. My unconscious knew what it was doing: erecting cages instead of fortresses to leave room for an eventual escape; leaving faucets on to keep the water running and create flow where there was stagnancy, fluidity where there was solidity, merging where there was separation, and expanding overflow where there was containment.

“Mistake” indeed.

***

Then, one day, I heard a knock on the door of a different kind:

I am walking to the mikveh with a group that has been on a spiritual tour of Israel, with their last stop Shmaya. The participants have brought with them their sacred intentions for their mikveh immersions. The spiritual intensity and anticipation is high. Then I see the water flowing down the path leading out of the mikveh. My heart sinks. I had gone to the mikveh an hour before to set up for the group. Then the tour guide called to say they were running late, so I went home to wait and take care of some things in the house. A memory of turning on the faucet to let a bit more water into the mikveh flashes in my head, but no memory of having turned it off!

I take a deep breath and close my eyes. But all is blank. I open them, and there is the group and the overflowing mikveh. This is not a dream. Or if it is, it is a dream seeping into my waking life. I wonder what Jude will have to say about this. And then comes the panic. I walk ahead as quickly as I can manage and open the door, expecting water to burst out and wash us away, like in my sleeping dream of weeks before. But that does not happen. The floor of the building, however, is flooded with water, like in my dream of the caged synagogue with its melting walls. The group is standing outside the door now, looking at me questioningly.

“We are going to have to sit outside for now, until I get the water out of here,” I say. “Our mikveh runneth over. Your overflowing spiritual energy flooded the mikveh!”

I do believe that is true. But I also believe that something in my own energy created this intersection between my conscious and unconscious selves. I experienced this event as an affirmation of the messages I had heard in my dream.

I graduated from One Spirit with interfaith ordination and certification as a spiritual director. I opened a spiritual direction practice, but I also continued my mikveh work and incorporated into it the skills and wisdom I had gained from my studies at One Spirit, accompanying others on their spiritual journeys, helping carry them where their individual flow takes them, and holding space for them in non-judgment. I incorporate dreamwork into my work with others, and this has remained one of my own main spiritual practices, my primary way of listening to the messages my soul is sending me when my defenses are down.

What an amazing teacher my own dreamscape has proven to be. As Rabbi Hisda says (BT Berachot 55b): A dream unexplored is like a letter not read. I feel open to whatever letters God sends in the form of dreams. Especially if the envelope is a mikveh!

Join Rabbi Haviva Ner-David for “Incorporating Self Care and Spiritual Direction into your Guiding,” a webinar for Mikveh Guides, on Sunday, March 21 at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT.