Valentine’s Day Is Not Jewish, But Love Is.
When Adam and Eve celebrated their first Shabbat together, did he bring her flowers from The Garden? Did he sing Eyshet Chayil with one finger holding the place in his brand-new siddur while alternately gazing at his wife?
Our tradition suggests that they were once one being, split into two and then reunited. They clung together as one flesh, but were they in love?
Some will say that the notion of romantic love is a relatively new idea. And while love as a basis for marriage is a somewhat recent development, the ability to feel and to give love was created by God along with heaven and earth, sun and moon, man and woman.
Love is embedded in our story of Rebecca who sets her eyes on Isaac for the first time and is so smitten that “vatipol may’al ha’gamal.” This is usually translated as, “she alighted from the camel.” But the unforced meaning is so much more … romantic, “vatipol – she fell off of the camel.” Isaac reciprocated that feeling; “he loved her.” (Genesis 24)
Their son, Jacob learned about love from them and recognized the emotion the instant he met Rachel. His expression of that love lingered unresolved for seven years of additional labor, yet “Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her.” (Genesis 29:20)
And of course, we are heirs to a Song of Songs, a love elegy so epic that Rabbi Akiva believes that “the entire world was never as worthy as on the day the Song of Songs was given to Israel. Though all the writings in the Torah are holy, the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.” (Mishna Yadayim, 3:5)
In the modern era, a Jewish people that is built upon an ancient foundation of love encounters Valentine’s Day. It is a holiday that Jews are taught to shun because it is really Saint Valentine’s Day, a day that is not only not ours – it is theirs. It is an 8th century Christian innovation designated to recall one or more people named Valentine whose deeds that earn him a holiday are unclear. This day, in turn, may have been superimposed on a pagan holiday honoring Cupid, the mythical personification of erotic love, he of bow and arrow notoriety, who is so clumsy that he accidentally shot himself.
They celebrate love once a year with a mysterious saint and a mythical deity.
We celebrate love every day with God.
“A Roman noblewoman asked Rabbi Yosei bar Ḥalafta: ‘From the time of creation until now, what has your God been doing?’ He said to her: ‘He is sitting and matchmaking; the daughter of so-and-so to so-and-so …’ She said to him: ‘I, too, can do so. I have several slaves and I have several maidservants and I can make matches between them in a single moment.’ He said to her: ‘If it appears simple in your eyes, before the Holy One blessed be He, it is as difficult as the parting of the Red Sea.’
What did she do? She took one thousand slaves and one thousand maidservants and stood them in several lines. She said: ‘So-and so-man shall marry so-and-so woman, and so-and-so woman shall marry so-and-so man.’ She made matches between them in one night. The next day, they came to her. This one, his head was wounded; this one, his eye was gouged; this one, his leg was broken. She asked them, ‘What do you want?’ This one said: ‘I do not want that one.’ That one said: ‘I do not want this one.’ Immediately, she sent for Rabbi Yosei bar Ḥalafta and said to him: ‘There is no God like your God. Your Torah is true, fine and praiseworthy; you spoke well.’ He said to her: ‘Is that not what I said to you? If it appears simple in your eyes, before the Holy One blessed be He it is as difficult as the parting of the Red Sea.’ “(Bereishit/Genesis Rabbah 68:4)
Matching people who hold a mutual loving attraction is as hard as splitting the Red Sea. Not once does Rabbi Yosei suggest this metaphor, but twice. Why?
Permit me to propose this understanding. There were two components to the miracle of the splitting of the Red Sea. The one that most readily comes to mind is the sea emptying itself out in the middle and rising up on two sides to enable the Jewish nation to walk in its midst. But as God narrates in the Torah, that is only half of the miracle. The second part, the part that completes the miracle, is when the sea comes together again, and only by coming together again enables the physical and spiritual freedom that will carry the newly born Jewish nation to their destiny. By citing the Red Sea twice, Rabbi Yosei is drawing our attention to the second part, the completion of the miracle, the sea coming together again, just as Adam and Eve had been separated and then came together again at the time of creation. They became one again, as did the sea. But were they in love? That’s the hard part.
Valentine’s Day is not Jewish. But love is. We don’t need a special day to commemorate the value of love and the role that it plays in our personal and communal lives. It’s true that the Talmud highlights Yom Kippur and Tu B’Av as celebrations of love (Ta’anit 30b). But my guess is that there are more Jews who vocally suppress Valentine’s Day then there are who actually celebrate love on these two Jewish holidays. Indeed, it is a sweet irony that Valentine’s Day nay-saying triggers talk of love, but we do not need such prompting. Our Jewish tradition and what it says about love predates the pagan folklore that grounds that holiday. Our Torah’s expressions of love are more splendid than the Sonnets. Judaism welcomes opportunities to talk about, to explore, to cherish the ability to love. The falling-off-your-camel type of love. When the rest of the world is celebrating their holiday one day each year, let us consider ourselves blessed on this day and every day if there are people in our lives to whom we may turn, to call them, to write to them, to say to them, “I love you.”
