Borrowed Garments, Buried Dead on Tu B’Av
I described the longing I feel walking through Jerusalem in my last piece, being among the stones without ever quite arriving at the city itself. Six days after Tisha B’Av, the same calendar now asks the opposite question. Can a broken vessel be gathered, and if so, in what voice.
I want to start with a small detail, because it seems to summarize the whole matter for me. The number fifteen in Hebrew would normally be written as ten plus five, yud and hei. But yud hei is part of Hashem’s name, Yah. So tradition never writes fifteen that way, using tet and vav instead, nine and six, a combination that gives the same number without putting the Name on paper. The name of Tu B’Av itself, the word tu, carries the trace of that avoidance. The day of love and unity begins, in its very name, with a carefulness not to write the Name where it isn’t needed.
The final line of the Mishnah’s tractate Ta’anit says there were no days of joy in Israel greater than the fifteenth of Av and the Day of Atonement. On those days the daughters of Jerusalem would go out in borrowed white garments and dance in the vineyards. The Mishnah explains why the garments were borrowed itself, so as not to shame anyone who had none of her own. The Zohar names the fabric of these garments too, not wool, not linen, but silk. This detail isn’t incidental. The prohibition on mixing wool and linen, shatnez, traces back, according to the Vilna Gaon, to the enmity between Cain and Abel, one offering linen from the earth, the other wool from the flock, and that rivalry was the cause of the first fratricide. Silk is neither wool nor linen, outside both materials in which that enmity was coded. The daughters of Jerusalem wore this fabric specifically on that day, choosing the one material that carried no trace of the first jealousy.
Reading this detail as a cliched “day of love” story misses what’s actually there. What’s happening is that the rich wore the same white as the poor, so that whose garment was her own and whose was borrowed couldn’t be seen. The words said to the young men point the same way, look at family rather than beauty, meaning look at what’s carried inside rather than what shows from outside.
The Arizal writes that the sefirah of Yesod, the capacity for bonding and union, is revealed on Tu B’Av. Tu B’Av falls exactly six months opposite Tu B’Shevat, two days 180 degrees apart in the annual cycle, one in winter when the sap begins rising inside the trees, the other in summer, the first day of joy after the year’s hottest days. It’s a symmetry in which an awakening from above and an awakening from below mirror each other.
The Talmud asks why this day was considered so joyous and gives six separate answers. Two of them stop me in particular, because both directly answer two of the five tragedies I wrote about last week. The first is that the generation wandering the desert stopped dying on this day, the forty-year sentence brought by the spies’ evil report coming to an end. The second is that burial was finally permitted for those killed at Beitar. After the Bar Kochba revolt was crushed, the Romans had forbidden even the burial of Beitar’s dead, and the sages record that the bodies hadn’t decomposed despite lying exposed for months. That day, a new blessing was added to Grace After Meals, HaTov VeHaMeitiv, for the good and for the one who does good. That blessing is still recited today, after every meal, often without anyone knowing why.
Another answer the Talmud gives is that the tribe of Benjamin was readmitted to the community that day, the oath sworn after the concubine’s death at Givah finally broken. This wasn’t only one tribe’s return from exile, it was, in a mystical reading, the closing of a far older wound. The oldest root of internal Jewish hatred goes back to the rivalry between the sons of Jacob’s two wives, Leah and Rachel, kingship descending through Leah’s son Judah, the Temple’s imagined site tied to Rachel’s son Joseph’s land. Rachel’s other son, Benjamin, became the bridge between these two lines, because the Temple ended up standing on his land after all. Benjamin’s readmission that day wasn’t a minor tribal event, it was a symbolic repair of the old rivalry between the two lines.
Writing about Tisha B’Av last week, I said the same date gathers five separate destructions, the calendar itself acting like a vessel that collects the pain of different centuries into a single day. Now I see that six days later does the same thing, in reverse. The sentence on the spies, the dead of Beitar, and Benjamin’s return were all either among the disasters that make up Tisha B’Av’s mourning, or rooted in the same source, enmity between brothers. Tu B’Av gathers the days some of those disasters were resolved into the same date. The calendar doesn’t just remember the wound, it keeps the moment the wound closed with the same fidelity.
But this gathering itself went into exile too, and I can’t leave that out. After the Temple’s destruction, Tu B’Av stopped being an actual celebration for almost nineteen centuries, the only trace left being that Tachanun wasn’t recited that day. The joy itself had shattered, its sparks scattered. The day came back into view in 1912, when HaTzvi, the newspaper founded by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man credited with reviving modern Hebrew, called for Tu B’Av to become a national holiday. Rishon LeZion, today Israel’s fourth-largest city, was founded on this exact date, and for years the city tied its celebrations to it. The Zimriya choir festival, launched in 1952, was first held on this same day. So the day stayed silent for close to two thousand years and only found its voice again once the people returned to their own land, as though joy itself had been in galut, waiting to be gathered.
The Talmud’s sixth explanation, that the ban on intermarriage between tribes was lifted this day, actually grows out of an inheritance dispute. In the Book of Numbers, a man named Zelophehad dies without sons, leaving only five daughters, Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. The daughters ask to inherit their father’s share so his name won’t be forgotten, and their claim is granted. But the right comes with a restriction requiring them to marry within their own tribe, so the land wouldn’t pass to another tribe. That restriction is lifted on this very day. I want to name all five daughters here, because this story usually gets summarized as simply “the tribes could intermarry,” when at its root are five women claiming their father’s inheritance for themselves.
What Durkheim called collective effervescence is useful here, but through the opposite mechanism from the mourning rite of Tisha B’Av. There the community bound itself together by grieving as one. Here it binds itself together by rejoicing as one, dancing in the vineyards, class difference briefly dissolved in borrowed white. Both serve the same function, reintroducing the community to itself as the same community across time, one through grief, one through celebration.
I want to tie this back to Rav Kook’s ahavat chinam, baseless love. As I wrote last week, if the destruction came from baseless hatred, the rebuilding had to come through baseless love. The borrowed white garments look, to me, like the wearable form of that teaching. A garment that makes it impossible to see who is rich and who is poor is a rehearsal of exactly what baseless love looks like. Sinat chinam magnified a distinction, showing who was right and who was wrong. Tu B’Av’s garment covers the distinction instead, at least for one day, leaving everyone in the same white.
This year Tu B’Av begins at sundown on July 28 and ends at nightfall on July 29, six days after Tisha B’Av. I wrote last week about the divisions within Israeli society, a harshness where no one feels the need to listen to the other side. What Tu B’Av offers isn’t an ambitious solution, it’s something far more modest, trying, even for one day, to see what someone carries rather than who they are. Maybe that’s exactly why we mark it every year on the same calendar, six days after the same wound.
I feel that same longing again, walking through Jerusalem. Maybe what I’ve been looking for was never a large answer, just something as small as that white garment, a moment where whose is borrowed and whose is her own stops being visible. Walking among the stones without ever quite arriving at the city itself may have been about learning exactly this, to see what I carry myself before showing it to anyone else.
