Tu b’Av

Tu b’Av, minor Jewish holiday popularly associated with love and marriage. It falls on the 15th day, a full moon day, of the month of Av on the Jewish calendar (July–August on the Gregorian calendar). First mentioned briefly in rabbinic Jewish texts from the first centuries ce, the holiday lapsed into obscurity until its revival in the 20th century. In modern Israel it has become a Jewish version of Valentine’s Day. The holiday’s festive mood contrasts sharply with Tisha b’Av (the ninth of Av), a mourning holiday only six days earlier.

Early historical records

The earliest reference to the holiday occurs in the Mishna (Mishna Taʿanit 4:8, c. 190–230 ce), where it is recorded that the rabbi Simeon ben Gamaliel called Tu b’Av and Yom Kippur the two happiest days for the Jewish people. The text further notes that on this day the daughters of Jerusalem would dress in white garments—borrowed so as not to embarrass anyone who did not own them—and dance in the vineyards. There they tried to attract the attention of potential suitors and asked the young men to see not beauty but morality and family. The Talmud further elaborates that men would seek brides at this time. It is also suggested in the Talmud that on this day the tribes of Israel met to permit marriage between them.

Other passages in the Talmud and later texts establish Tu b’Av as the day that various events in Jewish history happened, including the day that the first generation of Jews who fled Egypt in the Exodus—but expressed disbelief and hence were cursed to wander in the wilderness for 40 years and to die before reaching the promised land (Numbers 14)—stopped dying off; the day families would make annual donations of wood for the Temple altar; the day the tribe of Benjamin—after its banishment resulting from the rape and murder of a concubine in Gibeah (Judges 19–20)—was reincorporated into the Israelite community and allowed to intermarry; and the day the Romans permitted Jews to bury those killed during the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

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Jewish law codes regard Tu b’Av as a festive holiday, and thus the Tachanun (“supplication”) prayers are not recited. Yet there is little else in rabbinic or other Jewish texts detailing how and why the holiday was celebrated—indeed, it may have been a holiday in name only. In the 16th-century text Shulḥan ʿarukh (“Prepared Table”), the Jewish legal scholar Joseph ben Ephraim Karo (1488–1575) regards Tu b’Av as a time when nights begin to get longer and therefore afford more opportunity for nighttime Torah study. Otherwise, the holiday was lost to obscurity until its revitalization in the 20th century.

Modern revival

In the early 20th century two initial attempts were made to reconstitute the holiday. In Poland an Orthodox Jewish schoolteacher named Sarah Schenirer established the Bais Yaakov Jewish girls’ education program, in which she refashioned Tu b’Av as a women’s holiday. To celebrate, a group of women and girls in her school would hike into a forest beneath the full moon at night, light a bonfire, and dance and sing together. These festivities, attested to have occurred in the 1920s and ’30s, were similar to those described in the Mishna, albeit with no gazing men or matchmaking involved. They were simply a means of women’s bonding and uplift. Meanwhile, in Palestine in the 1920s and 30s, there were sporadic Tu b’Av parties in Tel Aviv and some girls on kibbutzim celebrated the holiday much as described in the Mishna with dancing in vineyards.

It was from the 1990s, however, that Tu b’Av as an Israeli and Jewish version of Valentine’s Day began to rise in popularity. Although the connection between Christianity and Valentine’s Day, which is commonly celebrated as a day to honor love, is minimal beyond the name’s reference to St. Valentine, it is not a native Jewish or Israeli holiday. Tu b’Av roots Valentine’s Day’s celebration of love in distinctively Jewish and Israeli texts and idioms.

Tu b’Av is celebrated in Israel very similarly to Valentine’s Day, with the expected and ubiquitous hearts and romantic tchotchkes (Yiddish: “trinkets”). It is sometimes called Chag Ha-Ahavah (“Festival of Love”). It is not an official governmental or religious holiday, but it has become popular within Israeli culture as a date for weddings, wedding proposals, and engagement announcements. It has also become a day for the traditional Jewish practice of matchmaking (Hebrew: shiduchim). In addition, this modern holiday is popular within Israel’s LGBTQ community as a date for holding gay pride parades and honoring gender transitions.

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