Why were so many men — old men, teenagers — queued up in a long line on Erev Yom Kippur, waiting patiently to be admitted? Was it a football game, a concert, a theater performance?

Answer: none of the above. This was in Jerusalem, and all these men were waiting to immerse themselves in the mikveh in preparation for the holy day. As it was in every major city around the world that day: The men’s mikvaos were very crowded.

But, you ask, a mikveh is only water. Why could they not have simply bathed at home? Because a mikveh, as is well known, is more than mere water, and immersion within it is more than physical cleansing. It contains specially prepared water, water in its most natural state, undefiled by human action or interference. Usually, it consists of pure rain water or water from a spring.

All of this ensures that mikveh waters replicate the original waters of creation. For at the very beginning of Bereishis, the Torah tells us that “G-d said, Let the waters be gathered (yikavu) into one place and let the dry land be seen.” Thus, when a Jew emerges from the mikveh waters, he is symbolically emerging from the waters of creation. All previous defilement is washed away, and he or she becomes a new creature, newly sanctified.

So all these men lined up at the mikveh were not simply taking a shower or bath. They were preparing to enter the holy day of Yom Kippur by immersing in a mikveh in order to sanctify themselves.

Mikveh is one of the most mysterious of all Torah mitzvos, not only because of the special requirements for the water, but also for what it represents and symbolizes.

Take the word itself. Its Hebrew root, k-v, is found in the word for “hope”: tikvah. Hope implies a longing, a yearning, a reaching for something beyond me. It also means a gathering, as in that verse from Bereishis, Yikavu hamayim: “Let the waters be gathered into one place.” When one hopes, every aspect of the self is focused — gathered together — into the yearning, longing, and aspiration for the desired goal.

In a remarkable metaphor, G-d Himself is described in Yirmiyahu (14:8, 17:13) as the “mikveh of Israel” — which means not only that G-d is the purifier and sanctifier of Israel, but also that He represents the ultimate gathering of all the hope of Israel; that is, He is the ultimate hope of Israel.

The word mikveh also contains the word kav. Kav means a “line,” a marker used by builders to maintain a straight line, as in Yeshayahu 28:10 and 13. Unlike a circle, a straight line has a beginning and an end, a past and a future, a history and a destiny. Mikveh contains in itself all these.

For consider: Water surrounds us, emanating from the seas around us, the ground beneath us, the heavens above us. It has always been there, before the beginning of time. It thus represents yesterday, the past. But water also represents the future. With it, there is growth, life, and a tomorrow. Without it, there is drought, destruction, death. When a person enters the special mikveh waters, he plunges into the mysterious realms of yesterday and tomorrow, of history and destiny. He becomes part of that straight line, the kav that — despite its seeming meandering — stretches from the beginning of history to the end of history.

This is not to suggest that the hundreds of men waiting to gain entrance to the mikveh were all thinking these esoteric thoughts. But hidden in their Jewish genes is the sense that the waters of the mikveh are not merely a substance composed of hydrogen and oxygen — H2O — but are in fact the gateway to concepts that introduce the soul to hidden, transcendental worlds.

It is surely this sense that motivated them to wait patiently for admission into these numinous waters that encompass in each droplet a gathering together, an ultimate hope, a past and a future that carries us from the waters of the Creation until the end of time when the “knowledge of the L-rd will envelop the earth like the waters covering the sea” (Yeshayahu 11:9).

Thinking such thoughts can make standing in line quite worthwhile. In truth, one can judge a person by what he stands in line for.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 732)