Post by Rabbi Neil on Aug 12, 2022 20:50:43 GMT
It is truly extraordinary that the festival of Tu B’Av seems to have been all but forgotten for a thousand years. Rabbis and students would read of it in Talmud but no-one would go the next step and create a ritual for it. It wasn’t until 1932 when a ritual was inadvertently created by a group of young Orthodox women who decided on Tu B’Av to take a mountain hike in the woods. Ninety years later, while some communities and Rabbis have made mention of Tu B’Av, there hasn’t really been much of an attempt to ritualize it. Perhaps part of that is because of the heavily gendered, sexual and patriarchal aspect of the Talmudic source on the festival – that women would go and dress in white, dance in the fields, and try to get men to pay attention to them. It wasn’t really a love day per se, more like a day for having women find a spouse by displaying themselves. In a world where Vashti’s refusal to parade herself to a potential suitor in the Purim narrative is seen as important opposition to patriarchy, Reform communities (who tend to create more rituals than their more conservative colleagues) are unlikely to promote a festival that was founded on the same custom.
Further than that, the original Talmudic passage which I mentioned at the beginning of the service describes the two most joyous days of the calendar as being Tu B’Av and Yom Kippur with the same ritual for both. Acknowledging the festival of Tu B’Av also means acknowledging a very, very different Yom Kippur experience, one which includes frolicking in the hills with potential wives. This is why, it is suggested, the traditional Haftarah for Yom Kippur afternoon is Leviticus 18, the Biblical text which tells you whom you may or may not have relations with. Not that anyone would be getting intimate on Yom Kippur itself, but if they’re choosing potential wives in the fields, they might want to just check that that union will be permissible after Yom Kippur. So, perhaps another reason that we haven’t really developed Tu B’Av is because doing so highlights how different observance of Yom Kippur could be to contemporary observance, and because no-one wants to go there.
There’s a third possible reason, though, which is that we’re embarrassed by love. Mitzvah is translated as commandment and those who perform mitzvot diligently have often been seen as the most devout Jews. Duty and observance became synonymous with mitzvah, and halakhah, Jewish law, became the foundation of Jewish life. The focus on observance reached the point of obsessive scrupulosity in later legal codes and in modern times that is difficult to read in any way other than an obsession with action. However, the underlying reason for those actions is often ignored, and that reason is love. Rabbi Amanda Green writes that “love is a covenant. Our entire Jewish tradition is about covenantal love – God created the world so that God would enter into a relationship of love with the Jewish people, God redeemed us from Egypt because God loved our ancestors, God brought us to the Mountain of Sinai and revealed the Torah, another covenantal contract of love.” The mitzvah of prayer is to pray three times daily, in remembrance of the three daily sacrifices of the Temple. The essence of that mitzvah to pray is not an act of blind repetition, but an act of love – just as the sacrifice was an offering of love, so too prayer must be an offering of love. And Jewish prayer specifically exists in community, so that this act of love is communal and not just personal. In fact, Jewish love is a three-fold experience. As Rabbi Laura Novak Winer writes, "The Jewish expression of love is a triangle: love of self, love of another and love of God. Leviticus 19:18 teaches us, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' To love another, one has to first feel and express love for oneself. We all know that this is not always easy to achieve, but it is vital. Finally, a loving relationship is seen as Jewish when the partners acknowledge, value and name that relationship as holy. Two people in love see the divine. Think of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables singing, 'To love another person is to see the face of God.' Ultimately, our understanding of God informs how we love ourselves and another. We must uphold the Jewish value of b’tzelem elohim, that we are created in the image of God. In so doing, we continuously strive to see that holy essence in ourselves and in others. With holiness as that measure for how we treat, care for and love each other, we can build truly loving relationships."
Taking this even one stage further, that love of self, love of the other and love of God necessarily includes love of the world around us. Our tradition holds that God loves all creatures – such as Psalm 145:9 which says that God is good to all because God’s love extends to all God’s creatures. So, it’s not just the human other whom we love, but everyone and everything outside of ourselves.
To many people today, love is a feeling, an emotion, which is perhaps why some people are embarrassed by love, by its irrationality, by its fleeting ephemeral nature. But love in Judaism is the basis for action. Judaism is about relationship, about connection. God created the world for relationship, for love. Every mitzvah is not an order but an expression of love. Mitzvah is love enacted. It is the outward manifestation of love. Viktor Frankl said that “love is the ultimate and highest goal to which a person can aspire” and that “the salvation of humanity is through love and in love.” That has always been the Jewish message. Only love, says the old Jewish proverb, gives us a taste of eternity. When we pray, when we gather in community, when we are intimate with a loving partner, when we help another, when we celebrate the world, when we connect with someone else, when we liberate another from strife, when we give of ourselves, we are expressing love.
So, if a festival originally consisted of women finding their place in a patriarchal society, why has it turned into a Jewish love day? Maybe because we desperately need it. On Tisha B’Av, we learned that the Temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred, because of the lack of love between people. Thousands of years later, that baseless hatred has not yet disappeared. When the Temple was destroyed, our tradition says that God’s immediate presence was removed from the earth. Rabbi Zadok HaKohen of Lublin said that that same Divine Presence will descend once again on Tu B’Av (Chaim Press’ The Future Festival (New York: Targum Press, 1996), p.156-159.) That means that Tu B’Av need not be connected with women parading themselves but, rather, with the hope that love will overcome, with the promise that we will be able to reconnect intimately with God once more, so long as we create the world in which that is possible.
Tu B’Av also looks forward. It’s exactly 40 days before the 25th of Elul which is, according to one source in Talmud, the day on which the world was created. We also learn elsewhere in Talmud (Mo’ed Katan 18b) that 40 days before a child is born, God decrees who their partner in life will be. Rabbi Arthur Waskow combines these two ideas and says that on Tu B’Av, God planned to become the eternal companion of the world that was to spring forth forty days later (http://shalomctr.org/index.cfm/action/read/section/tuav/article/seas24.html.) In my opinion, Tu B’Av is extremely important. It is the day of a promise, a promise of union at the beginning of the world, and a promise of reunion at the perfection of the world. That promise of reunion is a promise of love, and it is predicated not just on God’s love for us, but on our love for God as expressed through our love for the other. We can transcend the original observance of the festival and focus on the mystical, loving interpretation to help us form our own contemporary observance. To do that, we need to not be embarrassed by love, but empowered by it. With that, we can breathe new life into Jewish observance not just of this festival but of all festivals, turning mitzvah not into duty but into an expression of something far deeper and far more important. Today, we love each other, we love God, and we love the fact that we can love. We love the world that God created, the world through which we experience God’s love, and in which we can love God through community, through worship, and through acts of love. We love not because we are commanded, but we are in loving relationship with everyone and everything around us. This Shabbat, we celebrate that love and pray that Tu B’Av might bring us a greater awareness of the love that surrounds us always. And let us say, Amen.
Further than that, the original Talmudic passage which I mentioned at the beginning of the service describes the two most joyous days of the calendar as being Tu B’Av and Yom Kippur with the same ritual for both. Acknowledging the festival of Tu B’Av also means acknowledging a very, very different Yom Kippur experience, one which includes frolicking in the hills with potential wives. This is why, it is suggested, the traditional Haftarah for Yom Kippur afternoon is Leviticus 18, the Biblical text which tells you whom you may or may not have relations with. Not that anyone would be getting intimate on Yom Kippur itself, but if they’re choosing potential wives in the fields, they might want to just check that that union will be permissible after Yom Kippur. So, perhaps another reason that we haven’t really developed Tu B’Av is because doing so highlights how different observance of Yom Kippur could be to contemporary observance, and because no-one wants to go there.
There’s a third possible reason, though, which is that we’re embarrassed by love. Mitzvah is translated as commandment and those who perform mitzvot diligently have often been seen as the most devout Jews. Duty and observance became synonymous with mitzvah, and halakhah, Jewish law, became the foundation of Jewish life. The focus on observance reached the point of obsessive scrupulosity in later legal codes and in modern times that is difficult to read in any way other than an obsession with action. However, the underlying reason for those actions is often ignored, and that reason is love. Rabbi Amanda Green writes that “love is a covenant. Our entire Jewish tradition is about covenantal love – God created the world so that God would enter into a relationship of love with the Jewish people, God redeemed us from Egypt because God loved our ancestors, God brought us to the Mountain of Sinai and revealed the Torah, another covenantal contract of love.” The mitzvah of prayer is to pray three times daily, in remembrance of the three daily sacrifices of the Temple. The essence of that mitzvah to pray is not an act of blind repetition, but an act of love – just as the sacrifice was an offering of love, so too prayer must be an offering of love. And Jewish prayer specifically exists in community, so that this act of love is communal and not just personal. In fact, Jewish love is a three-fold experience. As Rabbi Laura Novak Winer writes, "The Jewish expression of love is a triangle: love of self, love of another and love of God. Leviticus 19:18 teaches us, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' To love another, one has to first feel and express love for oneself. We all know that this is not always easy to achieve, but it is vital. Finally, a loving relationship is seen as Jewish when the partners acknowledge, value and name that relationship as holy. Two people in love see the divine. Think of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables singing, 'To love another person is to see the face of God.' Ultimately, our understanding of God informs how we love ourselves and another. We must uphold the Jewish value of b’tzelem elohim, that we are created in the image of God. In so doing, we continuously strive to see that holy essence in ourselves and in others. With holiness as that measure for how we treat, care for and love each other, we can build truly loving relationships."
Taking this even one stage further, that love of self, love of the other and love of God necessarily includes love of the world around us. Our tradition holds that God loves all creatures – such as Psalm 145:9 which says that God is good to all because God’s love extends to all God’s creatures. So, it’s not just the human other whom we love, but everyone and everything outside of ourselves.
To many people today, love is a feeling, an emotion, which is perhaps why some people are embarrassed by love, by its irrationality, by its fleeting ephemeral nature. But love in Judaism is the basis for action. Judaism is about relationship, about connection. God created the world for relationship, for love. Every mitzvah is not an order but an expression of love. Mitzvah is love enacted. It is the outward manifestation of love. Viktor Frankl said that “love is the ultimate and highest goal to which a person can aspire” and that “the salvation of humanity is through love and in love.” That has always been the Jewish message. Only love, says the old Jewish proverb, gives us a taste of eternity. When we pray, when we gather in community, when we are intimate with a loving partner, when we help another, when we celebrate the world, when we connect with someone else, when we liberate another from strife, when we give of ourselves, we are expressing love.
So, if a festival originally consisted of women finding their place in a patriarchal society, why has it turned into a Jewish love day? Maybe because we desperately need it. On Tisha B’Av, we learned that the Temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred, because of the lack of love between people. Thousands of years later, that baseless hatred has not yet disappeared. When the Temple was destroyed, our tradition says that God’s immediate presence was removed from the earth. Rabbi Zadok HaKohen of Lublin said that that same Divine Presence will descend once again on Tu B’Av (Chaim Press’ The Future Festival (New York: Targum Press, 1996), p.156-159.) That means that Tu B’Av need not be connected with women parading themselves but, rather, with the hope that love will overcome, with the promise that we will be able to reconnect intimately with God once more, so long as we create the world in which that is possible.
Tu B’Av also looks forward. It’s exactly 40 days before the 25th of Elul which is, according to one source in Talmud, the day on which the world was created. We also learn elsewhere in Talmud (Mo’ed Katan 18b) that 40 days before a child is born, God decrees who their partner in life will be. Rabbi Arthur Waskow combines these two ideas and says that on Tu B’Av, God planned to become the eternal companion of the world that was to spring forth forty days later (http://shalomctr.org/index.cfm/action/read/section/tuav/article/seas24.html.) In my opinion, Tu B’Av is extremely important. It is the day of a promise, a promise of union at the beginning of the world, and a promise of reunion at the perfection of the world. That promise of reunion is a promise of love, and it is predicated not just on God’s love for us, but on our love for God as expressed through our love for the other. We can transcend the original observance of the festival and focus on the mystical, loving interpretation to help us form our own contemporary observance. To do that, we need to not be embarrassed by love, but empowered by it. With that, we can breathe new life into Jewish observance not just of this festival but of all festivals, turning mitzvah not into duty but into an expression of something far deeper and far more important. Today, we love each other, we love God, and we love the fact that we can love. We love the world that God created, the world through which we experience God’s love, and in which we can love God through community, through worship, and through acts of love. We love not because we are commanded, but we are in loving relationship with everyone and everything around us. This Shabbat, we celebrate that love and pray that Tu B’Av might bring us a greater awareness of the love that surrounds us always. And let us say, Amen.