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Where else but Jerusalem is it possible to become ritually pure while supporting water recycling at the same time? If a pilot project to recycle gray water used in mikva'ot (ritual baths) succeeds, holy-minded Jerusalemites will soon be able to simultaneously dunk, conserve on natural resources and save money, across the city.

For a religion born of an arid region, Judaism invests a great deal of ritual significance in water (a quirk it shares with its even more dessert-associated relative, Islam). Traditional Jewish communal life revolves around the mikveh, a deep ritual bath fed at least partly by naturally flowing water, utilized at various times by adult community members. Jews establishing a new community are required by Jewish law to build a mikveh even before a synagogue, and Jewish archaeological sites worldwide are often identified as such by the presence of mikva'ot.

The mikveh is not used for purposes of hygiene, but rather to remove tumah, a state of ritual impurity acquired through the expulsion of certain bodily fluids, contact with the dead or other, more esoteric ways. In practice, this applies chiefly to married women, who are required to immerse themselves in a mikveh monthly to remove the tumah associated with their menstrual period, and additionally before weddings and after childbirth. Men also immerse themselves in the mikveh before marriage, before Yom Kippur in many communities, and in certain stricter, or more purity-minded Orthodox sects, before every Shabbat or even every day. Immersion in a mikveh also serves as the culmination of the process of conversion to Judaism. Recent years have even seen some Jewish feminist thinkers embrace the mikveh as a unique symbol of Jewish womanhood, leading non-Orthodox Jewish women to immerse in the mikveh as an expression of identity and spirituality.

So naturally, a city with as many faithful Jews as Jerusalem is home to no less than some 35 man-made mikva'ot. As one can imagine, it takes quite a bit of water to keep 35 mikva'ot clean and filled. And with the water-poor Jewish state leading the global charge in modern water management, from conservation practices to desalinization tech, it was only a matter of time before the mikveh went environmentally-friendly. And it's all starting in Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem Municipality, in conjunction with the Jerusalem Religious Council and the Ministry of Health, will soon begin the experimental installation of water purification systems in one city mikveh as a test study, allowing mikveh gray water to be transferred daily into an external storage tank, cleaned, filtered, purified and cycled back into the mikveh the following day (in the planning process, the Ministry of Health has insisted that the recycled water be of drinking quality - not, of course, that one would necessarily want to). If the pilot is successful, the system will be introduced at other mikva'ot in town. Thousands of gallons of water will be saved every year, significantly lightening Jerusalem's considerable water burden. Yitzhak Hanau, the executive director of the city's Department of Construction of Religious Facilities, estimates that if each day's water is recycled even only once before being discarded, the city will save 500,000 NIS per year - and more if the Ministry of Health allows further cyclings.

In fact, this is an issue on which Jerusalem's Orthodox communities and environmental advocates see eye-to-eye. According to Roi Urbach, environmental adviser to the Moriah Company, which is installing the system, "the Religious Council is very excited about this project, and is one of its biggest supporters. Even before we presented our plan, they said they had investigated the matter and had only not proceeded with it because at the time they could not meet the Health Ministry regulations. They weren't only interested in it for idealistic reasons, but also as a way to save money, which is important to them as a body which constantly finds itself facing budgetary constraints, and which spends large amounts of money on water and energy for the mikva'ot."

Hanau sees the mikveh project, the first of its kind in Israel, as the ultimate combination of Jewish, ecological and fiscal values: "I want to tell you that this is something truly remarkable…. I don't think we could find a better solution. If we succeed, we will have proven a few things: first, that you can immerse yourself in a mikveh that's very clean even though the water is recycled and second, we will be able to save a lot of money.... This is a mitzvah that goes hand in hand with ecology."

Photo of a man in an ancient Jerusalem-area mikveh by Flash90 for GoJerusalem.com.