We just ended our time of communal mourning with the holiday of Tisha B’av. A scant six days later, in the full moon of Av, we have a very, very different holiday – Tu B’Av. There is compelling logic for matching the two holidays together. Martin Prechtel writes “If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love.” (The Smell of Rain on Dust, p.45). This is presented as an argument for the importance of grief, and it is also an important argument for the importance of love. We have this same idea in the Mishnah.“Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel said: There were no days as joyous for the Jewish people as the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur” (Taanit 4:8). We can only be joyous if we can grieve.
Tu B’av is a joyous, minor, and mostly unobserved Jewish festival. It’s sometimes called the Jewish Valentine’s day, but that seems to be trivializing it. The holiday is first mentioned in the book of Judges (21:19) and is a festival that served to integrate the tribe of Benjamin into the rest of the 12 tribes through intermarriage. All the eligible women would wear borrowed white dresses (so that no one could tell rich from poor) and would go out and dance in the vineyards and leave with a mate (Taanit 4:8). Tu B’av was a chance for us to honor the joy of our bodies…imagine dancing in the vineyards at the end of summer, the grapes hanging heavy on the vines, dressed in white under the full moon, and falling in love. It is squeezed between the three weeks of mourning preceding it, and the time of repentance during Elul (a half month away) followed by judgment in the next month of Tishrei, the month of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot.
So what are we to make of this holiday, and why and how might we reclaim it?
Being connected to our bodies, both in their aches and in their pleasures, is another form of connecting to Earth. We are Adam – Earthlings – our bodies come from the Earth and to the Earth they shall return.
We have no way of knowing what Tu B’av was intended as, and all of our rituals and holidays serve multiple purposes. I wonder if Tu B’av was in part a way of working with wild sensual energy, especially as we’re coming out of a heavy period of mourning and grief, connecting to our bodies, and their joys and pleasures.
How might we embody Tu B’av?
Dress in white and have a dance party under the full moon, go to a swimming hole or spend time outdoors in a beautiful place…maybe fall in love. Above all, celebrate the gift of your body, its sensuality and capacity for pleasure!
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About the Author:
Jared is the long time treasurer of Wilderness Torah and also a thinker and teacher of Animist Earth-Based Judaism. Follow him on substack at
animistearthbasedjudaism.substack.com or check out his website earthbasedjudaism.org
