Q&A: The Holiday of Love
The Holiday of Love
Question
Is there any real source for the idea that Tu B’Av is the holiday of love?
Do you celebrate it in some way?
Do you think love comes from giving (and not the other way around), as Rabbi Dessler writes?
Any chance you could write a column on the reasons that cause a person to love another person (finding part of himself in him, and so on)?
Answer
There’s no such thing as a holiday of love. Some people declared one and made up a holiday for themselves. Good for them. I can declare Tuesdays the holiday of cucumbers.
It seems to me that both are true.
Doesn’t seem so to me. That’s a question for a psychologist.
Discussion on Answer
Very cute
With God’s help, 16 Av 5780
From the words of the dancing girls on Tu B’Av, a number of reasons emerge that arouse love. Some call for the “love of charm”: “Set your eyes on beauty,” and others call for the “love of the good and/or useful”: “Set your eyes on family, for a woman is only for children.”
And the third group sees romantic love as derived from love of the Creator, and says: “Take your choice for the sake of Heaven.” What strengthens and fuels this ideal love is giving and investment: “provided that you adorn us with gold.” When a person resembles his Creator in the trait of kindness, the divine perspective grows stronger in his heart, and he loves the other as the Creator loves His creatures.
Maimonides, in guiding the path to love of God, teaches that this love is acquired and strengthened through contemplation of His greatness. One may say that love of another person can likewise be acquired and strengthened through contemplating the other person’s virtues, which brings one to love him. And indeed, the key to good marriage that Maimonides outlines for good marriage (in chapter 15 of the Laws of Marriage) is through the mutual respect that spouses have for one another. This mutual appreciation comes from mutual recognition of the virtues of one’s spouse, and in its wake comes the strengthening of mutual love.
Maharal brings two approaches from thinkers who discussed this. Some said that love comes from the similarity between the two lovers, while others said that the basis of love is mutual completion, and from that perspective it is דווקא their differences that sharpen the feeling that each one needs the other in order to be complete.
And we will conclude with the words of the first lover, Adam, whose initial love for his wife began with the feeling that they both shared one root: “for this one was taken from man”; and the continuation of love comes from the feeling of partnership in hope and destiny, the joint bond to bring new life into the world together — the “father of all living” with the “mother of all living.” The “covenant of fate” that comes from the common root becomes a “covenant of destiny” of shared hope.
With blessings, S.Z.
On the occasion of the 25th birthday of my son Avichai, may he live and be well
And how symbolic it is that those acting for the sake of Heaven make sure to end with gold
To the questioner,
There’s plenty of literature on this among our friends, the scientists of nonsense. You can look at Yoram Yovel’s book What Is Love,
Brezner Mazor’s book Love in Control,
Ayelet Malach-Pines’s book Falling in Love,
and also the analyst Stephen Mitchell’s Can Love Last?
and last but not least, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.
The Art of Loving is actually really good
With God’s help, on the eve of the weekly holiday of love, in the year 5780, under the order of the verse “because the Lord your God loves you”
To Rabbi Michael Abraham — greetings,
Indeed, the third day of the week is fitting, as you suggested, to be the “holiday of cucumbers,” the fresh symbol of the vegetables of “every herb yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth,” which were created on that day.
Vegetation nourishes and refreshes a person, but it is also the source of the oxygen that gives life to animals and human beings; and so it is indeed fitting to celebrate every Tuesday the cucumbers that symbolize the foundations of human life: food, water, and oxygen.
To the “holiday of cucumbers” on the third day will be joined the “holiday of love” on the sixth day, when man discovered his completion — the woman — who alone among all the creatures of the world suits him and completes him, and of her alone it can be said: “This time, she is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for from man this one was taken.”
This mutual love brings a man and his wife to the state of “and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh,” and then the woman also receives the mission of being “the mother of all living” and passing on parental love to the generation and the generations that will continue.
Indeed, the “holiday of love,” which begins every Friday, deserves the shared preparation for Sabbath the Queen, in which a person and his household cast off the weekday garments full of worry, jealousy, and daily competition, and reconnect in the pleasant atmosphere of “gladden the beloved companions as You gladdened Your creature in the Garden of Eden of old.”
With blessings for happy weekly cucumber and love holidays 🙂 S.Z.