Tu B'Av

Tu B'Av, the fifteenth of Av, is a minor but ancient day of joy that falls just six days after the mourning of Tisha B'Av, at the full moon. The Mishnah preserves a striking memory of it: it says there were no days as joyous for Israel as the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur, on which the daughters of Jerusalem would go out in borrowed white garments, so that none should be shamed by poverty, and dance in the vineyards, where matches were made. Several other happy events in the rabbinic calendar are attached to the day.

For most of Jewish history Tu B'Av had little liturgical content beyond the omission of penitential prayers, and it nearly disappeared as an observance. In the modern State of Israel it has been revived, largely in a secular form, as a day of love and romance, sometimes called a Jewish counterpart to Valentine's Day, marked by weddings, festivals and celebrations of relationships. It is a clear example of an ancient festival, once tied to the agricultural and marriage customs of a vanished society, being given new life and a new meaning by a living culture, and its placement so soon after the year's saddest day gives it, in the tradition, the character of consolation.

The modern Israeli revival of Tu B'Av did not begin as a commercial occasion but as a Zionist pioneer holiday: early twentieth century agricultural settlements and the kibbutz movement took up the day, drawing on its ancient association with vineyard dances and matchmaking recorded in the Mishnah, as an occasion for communal celebration and courtship among young secular settlers building a new agricultural society, a deliberate reclamation of an old rural festival stripped of its rabbinic and penitential associations to serve the very different ideological project of early Zionist settlement.

The day's later transformation into an Israeli commercial occasion for romance, comparable in retail terms to how Valentine's Day is marketed elsewhere, developed still later in the twentieth century, well after the kibbutz movement's own more communal and ideologically inflected pioneer-era observance had already established Tu B'Av as a day with some contemporary secular content to build on, so that the sequence runs from an ancient rabbinic memory of vineyard courtship, through an early Zionist agricultural and communal revival, to a present-day commercial romance holiday, three quite different social projects each finding their own use for the same recovered date.