Each fall, after Simchat Torah, we roll the Torah back to its very first words and return to a world before light, before land, before anything had a name. “The earth was unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). Before anything else took shape, there was water.

On the third day, God gathers those waters together, and the Torah names the gathering: “u’l’mikveh ha’mayim kara yamim,” “and the gathering of the waters He called seas” (Genesis 1:10). This is the first time the word mikvah appears in the Torah. Long before it described a ritual pool, a mikvah was simply a gathering of water, the place from which dry land and life could emerge.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan called his classic book on mikvah Waters of Eden, and the image fits. When we immerse, we step out of ordinary time and into waters that recall creation itself. For a moment we are fully held, suspended between what was and what will be. Then we rise, and like the world on its first morning, we begin again.

Bereishit also reminds us that beginnings are rarely neat. Creation starts with tohu va’vohu, chaos and darkness, and light comes only after. Many people come to the mikvah in their own moments of tohu va’vohu: after a loss, before a wedding, in the middle of a transition, or at the start of a year that still feels unformed. The water does not ask us to have everything figured out. It simply makes room for us to start.

As we open the Torah to its first page this season, we invite you to begin again too. Visit MACoM to experience the renewal of immersion, and let these ancient waters hold you as you step into something new.