Today Israel celebrates the day of love

The Day of Love - Tu B'Av - is not one of the generally accepted Jewish holidays, but rather, like Valentine's Day for Christians, it is a pleasant occasion to congratulate your loved one and/or propose.

Meir Levinov wrote beautifully about the history of the holiday: The fifteenth of Av is the day of the unification of the people.

Celebration of the 15th of Av in ancient times.

The 15th of the month of Av is marked in the Jewish calendar as a holiday. In fact, this mark limits the holiday events: no special customs, nothing out of the ordinary, a normal working day, except that the prayer in the synagogues is somewhat shorter - penitential texts are excluded from it. And that's all.

But once upon a time, "...there was no holiday in Israel more beautiful than the 15th of Av. Jewish girls would go out into the gardens in white dresses - borrowed, according to custom, from each other, so that no one would be ashamed of the lack of beautiful clothing. They would dance in circles in the gardens, and anyone who was looking for a bride would go there."

This holiday has existed since ancient times. Even before the establishment of the kingdom in Israel, even before the conquest of Jerusalem - even then, girls wishing to get married would go out to dance in the vineyards around the Temple in Shiloh. This holiday was very important. The fact is that in those days, each of the tribes of Israel lived on its own territory, and the people were more like a coalition of twelve "cantons" connected only by a common religion and agreements on military assistance in times of danger. At the same time, all the tribes watched over their allotment of land, trying not to let representatives of other tribes settle on their territory.

The law of the time allowed girls who owned real estate to marry only a member of their tribe, so that the land would not pass into the possession of another tribe, and so that there would be no enclaves of one tribe within another. All this helped to preserve the ethnic separateness of each tribe, its customs and traditions, but at the same time did not allow the people of Israel to merge into a single whole.

Inter-community marriages are the way to unite the tribes into a single people.

The meeting place of the tribes at that time was the Temple in Shiloh, where all the tribes of Israel gathered for the holidays established by the Torah. There, the elders of the tribes discussed matters, concluded agreements and made joint decisions. In fact, it was the Temple in Shiloh and the meetings there that united the tribes into a single union. However, a union at the leadership level does not yet make the people a single whole. Whatever the leadership thinks, the people are united into a single whole not at all by decrees from above. And even a common past is not capable of building a single people.

The fifteenth of Av is a holiday not established by the Torah, which arose on its own as a celebration of the grape harvest - it was this holiday that gave the people the opportunity to unite. On this day, young men and women from different tribes of Israel could get to know each other. And it was on this day that the elders of Israel decided to lift all restrictions on intertribal marriages.

All historical events associated with the day of 15 Av are events that unite the people of Israel. The lifting of restrictions on intertribal marriages marked the beginning of a long process of integrating Jews into a single people. For the most important thing in national unity is intercommunal marriages, the children of which belong to more than one tribe.

15th of Av is the day of correcting political mistakes.

At one time, thanks to the tradition of the 15th of Av, it was also possible to cope with the consequences of a severe civil war, in which all the tribes united against the tribe of Benjamin, deciding that for the sins of the Benjamites "their name should be erased from under the sky." Unfortunately, the tribes carried out their assigned task almost completely: they destroyed the cities of Benjamin, took all his girls captive and swore not to give their daughters to those who survived. However, in the end, the tribes changed their minds, but, not wanting to directly violate the oath they had given, they remembered the holiday of the 15th of Av and sent the following message to the remnants of Benjamin: "On the 15th of Av, when the girls go out to celebrate in the vineyards of Shiloh, come, steal them and marry them" (it is clear that in those years only those girls who wanted to be stolen went out to the vineyards).

Another historical event associated with the 15th of Av is the abolition of the border guards between the two ancient Jewish states, the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. After the collapse of Solomon's kingdom, the first king of the Northern Kingdom found it necessary to establish a guard on the border so that the Jews from the North would not go to the South, to the Jerusalem Temple, on holidays. The decision was purely political, made out of a desire to prevent the religious influence of the Southern Kingdom on the subjects of the Northern Kingdom, but in practice it led to the division of the people. But subsequent kings of the Northern Kingdom abolished this regulation so that everyone could go to Jerusalem for the holidays, so that the Jews would remain a single people.

Where danger cannot unite, love can unite.

It is hardly a coincidence that the unifying holiday of 15 Av is located on the calendar immediately after the day of mourning for the destroyed Temple - the day on which the exile began and on which the people of Israel were once again scattered to different ends of the earth, once again divided into separate communities. It was the Ninth of Av that led to the current situation in Israel, when from the outside the people appear monolithic, but inside the country the first thing that is revealed about every Israeli is his affiliation with one community or another: Moroccans, Russians, Yekis, Kurds, and so on. To the ethnographic differences are added political camps, and to them - religious divisions.

The events of the last decades have shown that today even external danger is not capable of uniting the people of Israel. Moreover, it has become the cause of one of the most serious rifts in Israeli society. But if even danger does not unite, then maybe love can? No, not the kind that politicians readily talk about, calling for love of everyone and everything, but the most ordinary love, when guys and girls from different communities and different political camps meet, get acquainted, get married and have children. Today, this is perhaps the only hope for uniting the disunited people of Israel.