Still Waters Run Deep, Unspoken Losses

The experience of losing one’s husband is unimaginable, at once painful, heartbreaking, infuriating, and achingly lonely. In its wisdom, Judaism offers the mourner a holding environment, a sacred space of comfort and belonging through the rituals of shiva and shloshim. And yet, beyond these moments of structure and embrace, there lingers a vast and unspoken emptiness. Because Judaism shapes so much of our daily lives, the places it leaves untouched seem to echo with an even deeper loneliness.

Photo by Miguel Bandeira on Unsplash

As Lin-Manuel Miranda so eloquently writes in the musical Hamilton, “Death doesn’t discriminate.” It is not reserved for the aged who have lived long, fulfilling lives and leave behind elderly, post-menopausal widow. Sadly, death comes at every stage of life, and widows are made at every age and in every season.

When my husband Josh z”l passed away on May 18, 2023, I felt as though much of my own identity was lost with him. There are countless books on aveilut, on personal grief, and on family grief. There are lectures and podcasts that address religious mourning and practical challenges, often with titles like Living through Loss or Embracing Your New Reality. Yet I have not found words that speak to the widow’s loss, to my loss, of religious identity.

In a woman’s kallah classes, teachings about sacred love, relationship, and the building of a bayit ne’eman beYisrael are interwoven with the laws of taharat hamishpacha, bound together, seemingly inseparable. Upon the loss of her husband, this mitzvah, once a constant companion and integral part of married life, becomes suddenly and painfully irrelevant.

Aveilut interrupts the cycle of taharat hamishpacha, leaving many women with a profound sense of incompleteness. There is no final immersion to mark an ending, no moment of closure, only the realization that even if a last immersion were to take place without a bracha, the return home would still be to a house marked by absence and loss.

I remember feeling so disoriented. My body had not changed in any physical way, my menstrual cycle continued just as it always had, yet the meaning it carried was completely different. For over twenty-eight years, the mikveh gave shape to my married life. Each month it marked a shift, a reset, a quiet renewal in my relationship with my husband. When that rhythm was gone, there was no longer a ritual that invited me to pause and take inventory of myself, my body, and my marriage. The months felt hollow, as though my physical cycle and my lived reality were no longer in sync. What had once been a source of connection and renewal now stood as a reminder of what was so painfully lost.

Without that anchor, I began to experience time in a new and unsettling way. Life filled quickly with caring for my children, managing bureaucracy, endless phone calls, and paperwork, and the hours folded into days and days into months. One of the great gifts of keeping the laws of taharat hamishpacha had always been the way it quietly marked time. Even during seasons when life blurred together, whether in pregnancy, nursing, the long months of COVID lockdowns and of course war, the cycle of mikveh visits created a rhythm that steadied me and offered a sense of order when everything else felt uncertain.

The loss of this part of my Jewish identity reached into the places that felt most meaningful to me. My volunteer work as a balanit at the local mikveh, my role as a kallah teacher, and my work as a couple’s therapist all began to feel different. What had once been steady sources of meaning and connection to my sense of self as an Orthodox woman, personally, socially, and professionally, gradually became shadowed by a quiet sense of not fully belonging. Rather than allowing that uncertainty to remain, I felt the need to pause, to reassess how I held these roles, and to consider how they might be reshaped to reflect the woman I was becoming.

Time, tears, and the conversations I have sought with friends and halachic authorities have helped me begin to make sense of my new reality and my changing relationship with the mikveh, as well as with many other parts of Orthodox Jewish life. My path is still unfolding, yet allowing myself to speak honestly about these shifts in how I see myself as an Orthodox woman has begun to reveal another layer of my religious self and deepen the way I connect with Judaism.

Beyond the technical halachic questions, it is imperative that conversations such as these are given space in the halachic world. Judaism has always prided itself on weaving together the emotional, physical, relational, and halachic spheres.

mikveh, I believe, is the epitome of our multi-dimensional religion. The still waters of the mikveh run even deeper as we, almanot (widows), learn to release them and search for new layers of meaning in other aspects of our lives as Jewish women.

Jodi Wachspress is a certified Couples and Sex Therapist as well as a Marriage and Family therapist, trained at Bar-Ilan University and the International Institute of Clinical Sexology. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Clinical Sexology, with a research focus on developing a revised protocol for Kallah classes tailored to the needs of divorced Orthodox Jewish women. Jodi is a seasoned lecturer at The Eden Center, where she teaches in the Kallah teacher training program on topics including anatomy and physiology, sexual desire and pleasure, healthy communication and more. She maintains a private practice in Modiin, where she works with individuals and couples navigating issues related to relationships and sexuality.