A Fitting Place to End: Learning at Mayyim Hayyim 

The Boston Repair Summer Service Corps cohort closed out its final learning session at Mayyim Hayyim, an egalitarian mikveh just outside Boston. Fitting setting for the last text study: who holds the authority to define ritual, and who gets left out of that conversation.

The Boston Repair Summer Service Corps cohort during its final text study session.

A fifth-year rabbinical student and mikveh guide from Hebrew College led us through sources on halachic authority, starting with Pirkei Avot’s chain of transmission from Moses to Joshua to the elders to the prophets, all the way down to the Men of the Great Assembly. Then we turned to Deuteronomy, which insists Torah isn’t in the heavens or across the sea, waiting for someone qualified to retrieve it.

“No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.”

We talked about what that means for redefining ritual for the individual, making room for trans Jews, for converts, for anyone marking a transition tradition hasn’t always had language for. If a chain of transmission can carry Torah all the way to us, and it’s already close enough to live in our mouths and hearts, then the authority to shape how we live it belongs to all of us too.

The Boston Repair Summer Service Corps cohort gathered at Mayyim Hayyim to close out the summer with a shehecheyanu.

Then Bev Klau shared how Mayyim Hayyim lives that out every day, before we sang the shehecheyanu together in the acoustic chambers beside the mikvehs.

Fourteen corps members spent a summer showing up, and moments like this are why.