By Angela Himsel

"I'm driving the car, an hour outside of New York," I was telling my sister Mary over the phone, "and it's a red light, so I stop. But when it turns green, I have to floor it to get the car to move! The engine light is on and I'm just hoping that I'll get back to the city without it dying on the road."

"Prayer cloth," Mary interjected.

"Exactly!" I said. "And I do. I pray for the car, and the next morning, when I leave for the city, the engine light was off, and the car ran just fine."

Mary was referring to an incident that happened when we were growing up. In our church, when someone was sick, he or she asked the minister for a prayer cloth -- a small, white piece of fabric which I guessed the minister or one of the evangelists had prayed over. However, one church member believed that it could also repair her ailing car and asked the minister for a prayer cloth so it would stop stalling. After hearing about this, whenever our car rattled or steam rose from the radiator, our brother Ed muttered, "Prayer cloth." Since then, "prayer cloth" became an inside family joke, hard to really convey to others, especially if you don't know how often our cars were on the fritz and thus how common it was that we whispered "prayer cloth."

Religious practices tend to be somewhat untranslatable to those on the outside, which was underscored the following day at a kosher luncheon downtown where my friend, Amanda, was introducing the kosher Italian wines for a company, Sentieri Ebraici, which she represents. The fish was served, but there was a slight lag before the red wine was poured, so Amanda got up to hunt down the rabbi. It was the rabbi, not one of the waiters, who must open the wine. The wine wasn't mevushal and couldn't be opened by a non-Jew.

Two thousand years ago, if a non-Jew opened and poured wine for a Jew, the rabbis believed it was possible he was secretly consecrating the wine to his god. Inadvertently, then, the Jew would be considered a party to his idolatry. The rabbis said that if the wine were boiled (mevushal), then the idol worshippers wouldn't want to use it in that manner. (Apparently, those gods had standards. Jews didn't.) Hence, today, if wine is not mevushal, the non-Jewish wait staff can't open it. The mevushal ruling is, to many within the Jewish world, an arcane law that need no longer be adhered to, but it remains, and it's hard for many Jews let alone non-Jews to understand.

That night, looking at a stack of metal whisks piled on the sink in our synagogue's kitchen, I was reminded both of the prayer cloth and of the mevushal wine. These metal whisks had just been returned from being teviled (immersed) in the mikvah (ritual bath) before they were allowed to be used for our Sisterhood's pre-Purim hamentaschen demonstration. That's a lot of translation necessary! Because the whisks were new, and metal, they needed to be immersed, not in order to clean them, but in order to "purify and uplift the utensil" (quoting from Jewish law). However, not all new kitchenware items need be teviled -- plastic bowls and various other items don't. There is a lot of minutia when it comes to mikvah rules in general, and the rabbis go on at length about everything from how long they should be immersed to which utensils require a blessing and which don't during the teviling.