This commonly happens in Israel each August: No sooner do digital promotions for lectures and worship services relating to Tisha B’Av fade than advertisements for love charms and singles events and romantic B&B getaways for Tu B’Av pop up.
The former event, the 9th day of the Jewish month of Av, is the saddest date on the calendar, a 25-hour period of fasting and commemorating such national calamities as the destruction in 586 B.C.E. and 70 C.E. of Jerusalem’s two holy temples. The second date, the 15th of Av, is known as the Jewish holiday of love and courtship, going back to the temple periods.
The calendar’s juxtaposition is considered intentional, with the solemnity of three weeks of mourning yielding to life-affirming joy — and what’s more life-affirming than young people finding each other, courting, falling in love and marrying?
Tu B’Av shows “that we’re over the whole mourning period and are rededicating ourselves to love,” said Rabbi Avidan Milevsky, a psychology professor at Ariel University. “It’s a sense of healing, of rebuilding a Jewish home. We kind of heal from the destruction of the Temples by building a temple at home when we’re married.”
That’s all the more vital now, in the depressing year of 5784 that began with Hamas’ invasion of the western Negev on Oct. 7 and extended to the ongoing war in Gaza and against the southern Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorist organization.
There were “no happier days for Israel” than Yom Kippur and the 15th of Av, when “the daughters of Jerusalem would go forth and dance in the vineyards” wearing white garments, Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel said in the Mishnah of Taanit (4:8).
“And what did they say?” he asked rhetorically, referring to the young women.
“Young man, raise your eyes and see who you’re selecting for yourself. Don’t set your eyes on beauty, but on family.”
The ritual began at Shiloh, the Samarian town housing the tabernacle in pre-temple days. “Go and lie in wait in the vineyards, and see and behold if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance, then come out of the vineyards, and every man will catch his wife among the daughters of Shiloh,” reads the Book of Judges (21:21).
A variation of the ritual was revived more recently. For 11 years, through 2019, Shiloh’s historical site hosted thousands of women coming to dance in honor of Tu B’Av. It was done “just as in Biblical days and exactly at the same place and time where it was customarily done by Shiloh’s young women according to ancient tradition,” a 2019 pamphlet states.
That pamphlet was published by the regional council of Binyamin, a section of central Israel named for the tribe of Benjamin, who lived there in ancient times.
If Tu B’Av represents singles joining, it also stands for reunification. The 15th of Av is the date a ban was lifted against the 11 other tribes marrying Benjaminites following the murder of the concubine of Givah that sparked a civil war, as told in the Hebrew Bible, also in the Book of Judges.
The Shiloh site dropped reenactments of the ritual dancing, but this August will host a concert by Israeli musician Eviatar Banai a few days after Tu B’Av in an event marketed to couples, according to an employee reached by phone.
A black-and-white photo from 1948 or 1949 shows young boys and girls at Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu participating in a Tu B’Av ceremony. The image, from the kibbutz’s archive, is in the National Library of Israel’s collection.
Another item in the collection, from the 1980s, is a colorful drawing marketed to adults — “steak in pita with a glass of brandy” and “a romantic atmosphere,” the text reads — for a Tu B’Av gathering at the Caesarea coast.
“The whole idea of Tu B’Av honors and recognizes romantic love and provides a framework that could work regardless of how a couple meets,” said Talli Yehuda Rosenbaum, a couples therapist and sex therapist in Beit Shemesh.
The ancient Tu B’Av ritual represents values in mating that remain primary today, including “consent and mutuality, choice and attraction,” she said. “It’s reframing the idea that marriage is just matching people up randomly.”
Aleeza Ben Shalom has worked as a matchmaker since 2012, when she lived in Philadelphia before moving to Israel. She even starred in Netflix’s reality-TV series Jewish Matchmaking.
“There’s nothing in the world I’d rather do than helping people find love,” she said.
“I’m part of the solution to modern-day people choosing no marriage over marriage. I’m part of the solution to build world peace,” said Ben Shalom, a resident of Pardes Hanna.
“It sounds crazy, but if we have stable, happy families, we can change the world for the greatest good.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected]
