 I recently received the following insight in an email from an anonymous contributer: A thought about preparing for Mikveh and Tefilah....
Hair which is not attached to the root anymore is considered chatzitza, which means that once it has fallen out and is not connected to the root, it becomes a foreign body which has to be removed.
Hair which is attached to the head, yet is knotted is also considered a "barrier" which, instead of having to be removed, has to be "worked through" with a brush or comb....
This reminds me of the concept of Tefilah as a way to untangle the knots in our line of connection to God.
There are things that are still "stuck to us" but are not a part of us anymore. They have become foreign, outside of us, disconnected from the root....Avodah Zarah as the Kotzker would call it. To step into the Mikveh of Tefilah with purity and integrity, one has to identify those stray strands of hair and brush them off. To step into the waters of the Mikveh and join as one, one must recognize the parts we have played in the relationship which were not an expression of our true self, the words and actions which were not attached to the "root of our head" or of our heart.
But even more difficult maybe, yet more powerful, is to recognize the "kinks" in the line; the knots created by damaging behavior, by careless mistakes followed by resentment and by bottled up feelings. Those are not simply to be brushed off; they are to be combed through.
Just as Tefilah straightens out the convoluted and tangled line to allow the relationship between man and His Creator to flow and grow, so too the process of purification requires a recognition of where the knots in the relationship lie and a conscious effort in untangling them. Combing out tangled hair can hurt, but it hurts less when one can appreciate that the pain is only there because the roots of the hair are still alive!
Working through the "kinks" in a relationship, smoothing out strained lines of communication, straightening up faulty patterns of behavior can also hurt....but one can embrace this process with joy and tremendous expectation with the realization that it is an indication that the relationship is there; it is dynamic, it is pulsating with life!
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