Wings of Refuge by Lynn Austin Page A

her mind as if shutting it away behind a locked door. “Do I have to go?”
    Mama’s hands froze in midair, nearly dropping the distaff and breaking the thread she had been spinning. “Of course you must go! The Law commands it! Didn’t I already explain to you that after a woman’s monthly time—”
    “Yes, yes, you explained already,” Leah said quickly, wanting to avoid the embarrassing lecture again. “But I still think it’s humiliating to have to walk past Reb Eliezer and all his Pharisee friends. Why do they have to hang around outside the mikveh anyway, checking to see who goes inside to bathe? They’re so nosy! Besides, the water is probably freezing cold.”
    “I suppose you expect to take a hot bath, like the Romans do?”
    “No, I don’t want to bathe at all!”
    “It’s the Law, Leah,” Mama said, stowing her spinning in a storage basket. “And the sooner we go and get it over with, the better.”
    Leah dragged her feet as she walked with her mother through the winding lanes to the public mikveh, shivering at the thought of her embarrassing ordeal. By sundown, the entire village would hear that she had paid her first visit to the bath and would know that she was now eligible for marriage. She lifted her shawl from her thin shoulders and wrapped it around her head, trying to hide her face.
    “Why can’t I just bathe at home?” she mumbled.
    “The bath is for purification,” Mama explained. “It must be ‘living water.’”
    “But the water in the mikveh isn’t ‘living.’ It doesn’t come from a free-flowing source any more than our water does. They both come from the village well, they are both stored in cisterns . . .”
    “They aren’t the same,” Mama said patiently. “Reb Eliezer sprinkles the mikveh with ‘living water’ and that makes it—”
    “That’s cheating! Water is either from a ‘living’ source or it isn’t. Sprinkling doesn’t magically change it.”
    Mama stopped walking. Her shoulders were bent, her face lined with weariness. “Leah, why must you always fight tradition?”
    “Because the traditions are stupid! Why doesn’t Reb Eliezer sprinkle our cistern? Then I could bathe at home. The Pharisees make us follow all their dumb laws, yet they don’t have to keep them. It’s not fair.”
    Mama grabbed Leah’s shoulders. “You hold your tongue, girl, and keep your thoughts to yourself! Don’t you dare bring shame on your father and me by speaking against the village elders! You will do what the Law prescribes without another word!”
    Leah would bathe in the mikveh. But she wondered, as she had so many times before, why carefully obeying God’s Laws never made her feel any closer to Him.
    As Leah had feared, Rabbi Eliezer guarded the door to the ritual bath. Worse, Reb Nahum, the ruler of the synagogue, stood beside him. Leah stared at the ground, her cheeks flaming, as Mama explained why they had come. But instead of quickly allowing them to go inside and have some privacy, Reb Nahum began to lecture Leah.
    “‘A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies.’ You want to be a good wife of the Torah, don’t you, Leah? Fulfilling your duties according to the Law?”
    She didn’t want to be a wife at all, but she nodded mutely, biting her lip to keep from saying the words aloud. Reb Nahum hooked his thumbs in his wide embroidered belt, rocking on his heels as if lecturing in the synagogue.
    “A godly wife will learn to keep a proper kitchen, to separate the clean and the unclean, to sanctify the Sabbath. These statutes were given by God and they are very important, Leah. The Law is our salvation.”
    Leah bristled. Then why didn’t they teach girls to read the Law so they would know exactly what it said?
    “A godly wife will make certain the meat is killed and cooked properly, and that meat dishes are never served at the same meal with dairy products. Remember, the Torah says, ‘Do not cook a young goat in its