GRIEF, LOVE AND SEX TU B’AV

We just marked out 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.  There is, I think, 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 Judaism in this 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 me 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 (there was historically some tension between Benjamin and the other tribes).  The Benjamite young men would get wives from unmarried young women of other tribes. All the eligible young women would wear borrowed white dresses (so that no one could tell rich from poor) and would go out and dance in the vineyards (Taanit 4:8).  The new couples would then go and live amongst the Benjamites, since ancient Israel was patrifocal meaning that new couples would live where the man was from (yes, I know this is all heteronormative, but that’s the text) 

So what are we to make of this holiday, and why and how might we reclaim it?  It’s easy to highlight the social justice aspect of all the young women wearing white.  I agree with that.  It is also easy to downplay the sexual nature of the holiday.  The Mishnah I quoted above from Rabban Gamliel continues to say “And the daughters of Jerusalem would go out and dance in the vineyards. And what would they say? Young man, please lift up your eyes and see what you choose for yourself for a wife. Do not set your eyes toward beauty, but set your eyes toward a good family.”   

Tu B’av calls to my mind (and maybe it is only me) the intermingling of Israelites and Midianites and/or the Moabites at Ba’al Peor (Numbers 25).  This also had a definite sexual aspect along with the idea of marrying outside the tribe.  I wonder if Tu B’av was in part a way of kind of regulating wild sexual energy while giving it some needed expression.  Or maybe it was a remnant of those Goddess worshipping sexual festivals we read about in our novels of preliterate human life?  This is all just speculation, of course, but to me it sounds a bit more realistic than thinking about the family of a young woman or man you’ve never seen before but catches your fancy.

Tu B’av is a chance for us to honor the joy of our bodies. It is squeezed between the three weeks of mourning preceding it, and then 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. Outdoor sensual activities with people dressed in white seems a fairly obvious adaptation.