Tu B’Av the jewish-Hebrew Valentine Day
31 Jul 2009 Leave a Comment
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Tu B’Av
Outside of Israel, Tu B’Av, the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Av, is the most minor of holidays. In Israel, almost everyone has heard of the holiday of Tu B’Av because it has been warmly embraced by the secular public as a kind of Valentine’s Day, since the holiday is also known as “the Day of Love.”
What is this holiday of Tu B’Av? A clear reference to the day is found in the Mishna, written almost 2,000 years ago.
The Mishna speaks of Tu B’Av as a festive day upon which the “daughters of Jerusalem” would go out into the vineyards with white clothes that they had borrowed (so that no could tell who was rich or poor), and the girls would sing: “Boys, choose carefully. Don’t look at appearances, but look at our families, for it is written, ‘Grace is deceptive, Beauty is illusory.It is for her fear of the Lord that a woman is to be praised.’”
Here, therefore, is an original source for Tu B’Av as a Jewish “Day of Love.”
The way that modern Israel celebrates this holiday, however, is a little different from the way it was celebrated in the days of old.
On Tu B’Av in Israel, restaurants as well as music, dance, and theater festivals all try to capitalize on this romantic holiday by promoting events for lovers. Historical significanceThe fifteenth day of Ab was a popular holiday during the second Temple.
The holiday celebrated the wood-offering brought in the temple. Josephus refers to this holiday as the Feast of Xylophory (wood bearing).According to the Talmud Tu B’Av was a joyous holiday in the days ot the Temple in Jerusalem: Unmarried girls would dress in simple white clothing (so that rich could not be distinguished from poor) and go out to sing and dance in the vineyards surrounding Jerusalem.
The Talmud states that there were no holy days as happy for the Jews as Tu B’Av and Yom Kippur. Various reasons for celebrating on Tu b’Av as cited by the Talmus and its commentators:
While the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years, female orphans without brothers could only mary within their tribe, to prevent their father’s inherited land in the Land of Israel from passing on to other tribes.
On the fifteenth of Av of the fortieth year, this ban was lifted. That same year, the last of the generation of the sin of the spies, which had been forbidden to enter the Promised Land, died out.The Tribe of Benjamin was allowed to intermarry with the other tribes after the incident of the Concubine of Gibeah.
Cutting of the wood for the main altar in the Temple was completed for the year.Tu B’Av is both an ancient and modern holiday. Originally a post-biblical day of joy, it served as a matchmaking day for unmarried women in the second Temple period (before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E).
Tu B’Av was almost unnoticed in the Jewish calendar for many centuries but it has been rejuvenated in recent decades, especially in the modern state of Israel.
It is gradually becoming a Hebrew-Jewish Day of Love, slightly resembling Valentine’s Day.
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