College students from Colby Faculty helped harvest ice from a pond for a brand new mikvah, or ritual bathtub, at a synagogue in Waterville.
WHY WE’RE HERE
We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time. When a synagogue in Maine wanted water for a ceremonial Jewish bathtub, it drew on a becoming pure supply, with the assistance of some associates.
Reporting from Waterville and Sturdy, Maine
April 6, 2024
Standing on a frozen pond in western Maine one Sunday morning final month, carrying L.L. Bean boots and a hooded sweatshirt, Rabbi Rachel Isaacs paused to consecrate the ice beneath her toes earlier than she commandeered it for the next objective.
“Blessed are you, God, who has introduced us to this second!” the rabbi belted out. Austin Thorndike, a member of her congregation at Beth Israel Synagogue in Waterville, stood beside her. When the prayer was over, he fired up his chain noticed and bent to dip it into the exhausting floor of the pond, deftly making 4 fast cuts to free a slick, white, cartoon-perfect block of ice.
The ice was destined for a extremely uncommon finish. Because the blocks multiplied, a crew of Colby Faculty scholar athletes sprang into motion, pulling them from the pond, pushing them to shore and swiftly loading them into ready vans. Subsequent, the frozen cargo could be pushed 40 miles to the synagogue, the place the scholars would carry it to the basement. There, they’d wipe every block clear with a material, stack it within the congregation’s brand-new mikvah, and depart it to soften.
The mikvah — a conventional Jewish bathtub utilized in rites of renewal and purification for 1000’s of years — would elevate this small synagogue in Waterville, a metropolis of 16,000, to a vacation spot for individuals from throughout Maine in search of a symbolic contemporary begin. However its creation, in accordance with historic Jewish regulation, was not so simple as turning on a faucet. To be kosher, a brand new mikvah have to be initiated with “residing water,” taken straight from nature.
Harvesting ice from a pond was not the simplest strategy. (Gathering rainwater is extra frequent.) However the woodsy, wintry plan felt proper for Maine, individuals mentioned. So did the involvement of Colby college students, a few of them Jewish and a few not.
In a rural state the place a small Jewish inhabitants typically wants grit, ingenuity and robust relationships to realize its objectives, the small liberal arts school and the small Waterville synagogue have lengthy been carefully tied. Friday evening dinners at Beth Israel, hosted by Colby Hillel, the Jewish group on campus, reliably serve 30 to 40 college students, a mixture of working towards Jews, their non-Jewish associates and others drawn to the comfortable routine.
It was pure, then, for Rabbi Isaacs to hunt ice-hauling assist from college students at Colby, the place she is an assistant professor of Jewish research and director of the school’s Heart for Small City Jewish Life.
Andrew Postal, a sophomore from Andover, Mass., introduced fellow rugby gamers to the frozen pond, whereas Caitlin Kincaid, a senior from Colorado Springs, Colo., enlisted 10 members of the Colby Woodsmen Staff, expert in sawing wooden and swinging axes.
“Higher physique energy is one thing now we have in abundance at Colby,” Rabbi Isaacs mentioned.
At many synagogues, significantly Orthodox ones, the mikvah is reserved for strictly conventional makes use of, together with conversion to Judaism and symbolic cleaning by girls after menstruation. The brand new Waterville mikvah will likely be one of some dozen throughout the nation, and the one one in Maine, that’s as a substitute “open” — a part of a 20-year-old motion by some extra liberal congregations to make the custom extra inclusive, by utilizing it to look at a extra numerous array of milestones, like a school commencement or a gender transition.
College students recruited by the rabbi have been wanting to pitch in, even when they didn’t know what a mikvah was earlier than she defined it.
“Everybody was like, ‘Yeah! The synagogue wants ice!’” mentioned Will Whitman, 22, a senior rugby participant who had rapidly signed on to assist. “Then we have been like, ‘Wait — why does the synagogue want ice?’”
Stepping out onto the pond, their boots fortified with strap-on ice cleats, the scholars and different volunteers took turns gripping the heavy, freshly lower blocks with a pair of outsized log tongs and pulling them from the water. “It’s just like the claw recreation,” mentioned Alex Kimmel, 31, a member of a Jewish congregation in Augusta, as a block slipped out of her grasp and splashed again into the pond.
Others stood again and marveled on the scene — the small, spring-fed pond ringed by birch and pine; the effective mist rising from the melting snow; the scholars scooting ice blocks onto a plastic sled, which they dragged up a steep ridge of snow to the ready vans. Multiple onlooker was reminded of the opening scene of “Frozen,” the Disney movie set in frosty Arendelle.
To plan the operation, Rabbi Isaacs, 41, had leaned on the experience of Mr. Thorndike, 35, an arborist and native Mainer who had provided the ice from a pond on his household’s land. (“I’m from the Jersey Shore,” Rabbi Isaacs mentioned. “I belief the Maine-ness of my congregation.”)
Mr. Thorndike’s personal conversion to Judaism, in 2020, helped spur the plan to construct an in-house mikvah at Beth Israel. An immersion in residing water is required to finish the conversion course of, however the nearest mikvah, about 60 miles away in Bangor, was closed on the time due to the pandemic.
Wanting to seal the deal, Mr. Thorndike had agreed to immerse himself in a Maine lake as a substitute — in October.
“To be kosher, it must be three full submersions, and you’ll’t be touching something, so I used to be treading water,” he mentioned. “It was like Navy SEAL coaching.”
Watching him endure, the rabbi resolved to engineer a much less painful choice.
“His enamel have been chattering a lot he may barely say the blessing,” she recalled.
Conversions have occurred with growing frequency since Rabbi Isaacs arrived to steer Beth Israel. The congregation, based in 1902, had dwindled to fewer than 20 households by the point she turned rabbi in 2011. It has since rebounded to 70.
Greater than 20 p.c of its present members are “Jews by selection” who weren’t raised within the faith — progress that Rabbi Isaacs sees as vital to her synagogue’s future, “and to the way forward for small-town Jewish life” throughout America.
The synagogue enlisted different Jewish congregations in Maine, which may even use the mikvah, to assist pay for its ongoing upkeep.
“You may anticipate to see this in Boston or New York, however to have it right here, in a small school city, is extraordinary,” mentioned Julie Childers, director of the Mayyim Hayyim mikvah in Newton, Mass. “Generally it’s small cities the place issues like this will occur.”
Ms. Childers, who traveled to Maine for the ice harvest, oversees a nationwide community of “open” mikv’ot (the plural of mikvah), offering steering on building, coaching periods and textual content for ceremonies, amongst different companies.
Rabbi Isaacs — who mentioned she thinks of herself as “Waterville’s rabbi,” not simply Beth Israel’s — will welcome non-Jews into the mikvah too, in step with the synagogue’s numerous relationships.
“It’s a venue for deepening one’s relationship with spirituality, for starting once more,” she mentioned. “There aren’t many venues for that form of renewal.”
With the Colby college students retaining a brisk tempo, shedding layers of clothes as they labored, the ice was lower and prepared for transport in beneath an hour. Whisked by the woods and villages of western Maine — Rabbi Isaacs drove 10 of the 60 blocks herself in her pickup truck — the ice arrived on the synagogue simply after midday.
It melted quickly within the 60-degree room, dripping audibly into the deep basin and slowly filling it within the days that adopted. After some water evaporated, Mr. Thorndike needed to ship just a few extra blocks, to make sure the mikvah contained the ton of residing water required by Jewish regulation. However by the center of March, the mikvah was prepared.
On a Sunday afternoon two weeks after the ice harvest, Lucia Greene, 18, a Colby scholar, turned the primary to finish her conversion to Judaism within the mikvah, descending its seven steps — representing the seven days of creation described within the Torah — and immersing herself inside its filtered, heated waters.
The milestone felt surreal, she mentioned — and in addition “too quickly,” even after practically two years of preparation.
“However I’d been feeling Jewish for some time,” she mentioned. “And when that’s how you are feeling, it’s time to enter the mikvah.”
