Re-posted from the Rabbi's words 8/16/2024
Thoughts on Tu B’Av – The 15th of Av
This week the annual period of mourning, the three weeks leading from the minor fast day of the seventeenth of Tammuz to the major fast day of national mourning on the ninth of Av, have come to a close. On Monday night we chanted the Book of Lamentations as a distinctive mournful dirge and on Tuesday morning we recalled all the various calamities and disasters that have befallen our people from ancient time to the present on this date or, at least, at this season in poetic expression known as kinot following the morning service. The sages rooted this day of disaster in the biblical narrative in the Book of Numbers which tells of the misleading report brought back to the Israelites by the spies who were sent by Moses into the land of Canaan. While these scouts extolled the virtues of the land they had seen,they insisted that conquest of that territory was beyond the capabilities of the people of Israel. They saw giants inhabiting the land in fortified cities and regarded themselves as mere grasshoppers by comparison.
The rabbis taught that due to this lack of faith and the unwarranted weeping of the people that night, a decree was issued by the Lord sending the people back into the wilderness to wander for forty years until that faithless generation had died out. In future generations that date, the ninth of Av, would be the occasion for calamity upon calamity, disaster following disaster for centuries to come. My last essay listed many of those tragic moments in Jewish history associated with the month of Av including the destruction of both the first and second temples in Jerusalem.
I also pointed out in that previous essay that despite the mournful character of this season and, particularly of the fast of Tisha B’Av itself, our sages still found reason for hope and renewal following disaster. In the book of Lamentations itself, even as the author of the third elegy cries out about his suffering, he insists nonetheless “ulai yesh tikvah,” perhaps there is yet hope. Out of this glimmer of faith and trust comes the notion that on Tisha B’Av itself the Messiah, the hoped-for savior of Israel and the world, was born. Thus, beginning this week, we enter a seven-week period of comfort and consolation leading up to Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of a new year.
Each week during this period we turn to the prophecies in the latter part of the book of Isaiah, believed to be the work of an anonymous prophet who lived long after Isaiah himself, at the time of the return of Jews to the land from the exile in Babylonia. This Shabbat is known as Shabbat Nachamu from the opening words of the haftarah, “Nachamu, nachamu ami, yomar eloheichem,” “Comfort, comfort my people, says Your God.” For the following six weeks we will continue to ascend from mourning to celebration. We will begin the process of return to God once more, after suffering the consequences of faithlessness. Just before Rosh Hashanah, the last of these haftaroth proclaims “Sos asis badonay,” “I shall indeed rejoice in the Lord.”
This Monday, however, is the fifteenth day of the month of Av, it is known as Tu B’Av. “Tu” is made up of the letters tet and vav, which stand for nine and six in numerical value, equaling 15. Six months earlier (seven in this leap year) we marked Tu B’Shvat, the new year of the tree, on the 15th of the month of Shvat. Out of respect for God’s name “Yah,” as in Hallelu-Yah, we use 9 and 6, rather than ten and five which would spell out this divine name.
The Mishnah, our earliest collection of law, tells us that there never were such joyful days as Yom Kippur and Tu B’Av. What’s so joyful about Yom Kippur, you may ask? It is the day on which God and Israel were reconciled following the sin of the Golden Calf and on which Moses descended Mount Sinai once more, radiant with horns of light, bearing the second set of the Ten Commandments, which replaced the first set of tablets that he had smashed at the foot of the mountain when he saw the people dancing around the calf. This day, ever after, has been the Day of Atonement, a day when we might hope for the remission of sins and atonement for our transgressions once again.
As for Tu B’Av, it is less clear why we might celebrate, yet we’re told that on that day and on Yom Kippur afternoon, the unmarried young women of Jerusalem would go out into the vineyards dressed in white dresses borrowed from one another so that no one might be embarrassed and they danced and called to the eligible bachelors, to choose their wives. If you remember Al Capp’s Lil Abner, you may recall Sadie Hawkins’ Day, a fictitious holiday invented by the cartoonist back in the 1930s on which women asked men for a date or to dance. It became an annual event in the comic strip and was picked up on college campuses and elsewhere as a regular holiday. I don’t know that Al Capp (Alfred G. Caplin) was inspired by Tu B’Av, but there seems to be some similarity here.
Regardless, this date appears to have been set aside as a festive day going back to biblical times if not earlier. We don’t know its origins and who established it, but clearly it already existed in antiquity.The rabbis give a multitude of reasons for celebration on this day and I will not list them all. In doing so this celebration parallels the long list of calamities which they associate with Tisha B’Av. In effect,Tu B’Av begins the process of healing by reversing some of the elements of that day of mourning, some of the purported reasons that led to punishment and rebuke on that national fast day. If the destruction on the 9th of Av came from lack of faith, from causeless hatred of one another, from idolatry, and from division, the 15th of Av seems to celebrate occasions when these sins were reversed and when the process of reconciliation had begun. Thus, for example, on Tisha B’Av the decree went forth that the generation of the Exodus was condemned to die in the wilderness. On Tu B’Av, forty years later, the end of that decree came and people of that generation stopped dying and the new generation had reached maturity and prepared to go forth to conquer the land that their parents had rejected. It was cause for celebration.
We read that for the first generation that entered the land and received their tribal inheritance, women like the daughters of Zelophehad of whom we recently read in the Torah, who had inherited their father’s portion in the land were not allowed to marry men from other tribes lest they diminish the holdings of their own tribe. On Tu B’Av, this decree was ended for succeeding generations.
As the result of an outrage committed by the men of the tribe of Benjamin that is described at the end of the book of Judges, a time of lawlessness when there was no king or central authority in the land, that tribe was nearly obliterated by the other tribes, and the men of those tribes vowed not to allow their daughters to marry any of the 600 survivors of Benjamin. It was on Tu B’Av that a solution of sorts was found which allowed the tribe of Benjamin to find wives and begin to regenerate and later produce Saul, the first king of Israel.
Other events mentioned also stress healing and reconciliation. One of the Tisha B’Av calamities was the fall of Betar, marking the end of the Bar Kochba revolt against Rome in 135 CE. We’re told that the Romans at first forbade the burial of the warriors who had died in battle there. However, on Tu B’Av, eventually, the Romans relented and the fallen heroes were allowed burial, providing reason for celebration.
Other reasons are given for the joy of this day, but the picture that emerges is of a day of healing and bringing people together once more, undoing those things which caused pain and division among the people.
This year, many people have added the horrific attack by Hamas of last Simchat Torah to the list of calamities to be recalled. New elegies have been written and added to the kinot, the poems that recall past tragedies and are read each year on Tisha B’Av. As we remember and memorialize our past martyrs and commemorate tragedy and destruction from years gone by we acknowledge as well the ongoing loss and pain of the present crisis. When Tisha B’Av ends we are supposed to begin the process of healing and comfort and return to the Lord. However, this year with the pain still fresh, when our hostages are still not free, when the war goes on, people are still displaced from their homes and businesses, and soldiers and civilians are still being added to the list of casualties, it is difficult if not impossible to feel comfort yet. We pray that that day may soon arrive.
We can only cling to faith that God may give us and our Israeli brothers and sisters the strength to face the remaining challenges and ultimately overcome the forces arrayed against us wherever we live. We pray for peace, for a world where love of neighbor overcomes the pointless hatred still so prevalent in this world. May the day soon come when we will find comfort and harmony and when tranquility will be established around the world.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Edward Friedman
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