Rabbi AARON RASKIN (Congregation B'nai Avaraham, Brooklyn Heights): I believe the mikvah makes marriages. And women have their two weeks or 12 days every month. And this gives the woman their space and their identity as a woman, and that way the husband can respect her as a person. The mikvah is something that brings passion and respect into a marriage.

WILLIAMS: It can also bring healing. Adina Kalet recruited her rabbi and her sister-in-law, a cantor, to help her devise a mikvah ritual during the grueling, technical, nothing-sacred-about-it process of in-vitro fertilization.

Dr. ADINA KALET (Mikvah User): Mikvah is that purifying ritual -- you reconnect with your body, you acknowledge whatever has gone wrong, what can't be fixed, and you come out feeling purified by this.

WILLIAMS: After five cycles of in-vitro fertilization failed, Adina and Mark Kalet adopted a baby girl. And returned to the mikvah as a family where Sara was immersed, as are all converts, to become a member of the Jewish people.

Dr. KALET: My daughter's conversion felt to me like a real transition and transformation to the next phase of our life; that we had struggled with infertility for five years -- it was a very, very difficult and dispiriting period of time -- and now it was over.

WILLIAMS: Growing numbers of non-Orthodox Jews are reclaiming ritual immersion, but on their own terms: to mark the end of chemotherapy or put trauma behind them, to put a coda on a miscarriage, the death of a parent -- or a marriage, to mark transitions in their lives. To meet this demand, many conservative synagogues in America are building new mikvahs. And the Reform Movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted new conversion guidelines encouraging it.

For Orthodox Jews, building a mikvah is a community's highest priority -- considered more pressing even than building a synagogue, because it represents continuity from one generation to the next. Even while under siege by the Romans in a place where water was scant, the Jews atop the desert plateau Masada built two mikvahs. Tradition dictates communities sell a Torah scroll if that's what it takes to fund the building.

The Talmud gives precise building instructions: a tiled square pool, five by five feet, filled with 200 gallons of water which is "kissed" by natural waters from the rain or a river. Mayyim Hayyim, "living waters," is the name of a new mikvah educational center being constructed in Newton, Massachusetts. Anita Diamant, who authored THE RED TENT, a story of the women in Abraham's era, is spearheading the project.

ANITA DIAMANT (Author, THE RED TENT): "Mayyim Hayyim" means living waters, and that is the water that metaphorically connects us back to the beginning of time, to the water that flows from Eden.

Clearly it's not just for people who have had miscarriages, but for people who have suffered illness and loss. And this is sensitive stuff. So our volunteer group includes psychiatrists, oncologists, social workers, clergy who are working to figure out the best ways to facilitate these experiences, to make them safe, and to make them as meaningful as possible.

I really see it as an international model, and not just of mikvah but of the appropriation of Jewish tradition for the future in a really creative, beautiful, joyful, forward-looking way.

WILLIAMS: And another demonstration of Judaism's ability, rooted in tradition, to recast itself as a living faith for a new century.

I'm Mary Alice Williams for RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY.