This year Tu B’Av occurs the evening of
August 15 and goes until the following evening August 16.
The Talmud states that there were no holy
days as happy as Tu B'Av and Yom Kippur. According to
Chabad.org “the Talmud considers this the greatest festival of
the year, with
Yom Kippur (!) a close
second!”
Various reasons for celebrating on Tu B'Av
are cited by the Talmud and Talmudic
commentators.
Briefly they are as follows.
-
While the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years, female
orphans without brothers could only marry within their tribe
to prevent their father's inherited territory in the
Land of
Israel from passing on to other tribes. On the
fifteenth of Av, this ban was lifted and inter-tribal marriage
was allowed.
-
That same year, the last of the generation of the
sin of the spies, which
had been forbidden to enter the Promised Land, found that they
were not destined to die. For forty years, every Tisha B'av
night, the Jews made graves for themselves in which they slept
on Tisha B'Av; every year a proportion of them died. In the
40th year, the fifteen thousand who had remained from the
first generation went to sleep in the graves and woke up the
next day to their surprise. Thinking they made a mistake with
the date, they did this until they reached Tu B'Av and saw a
full moon. Only then did they know they were going to enter
the Land of Israel with the new generation.
-
The
Tribe of Benjamin was
allowed to intermarry with the other tribes after the incident
of the
Concubine of Gibeah (see
Judges chapters 19–21).
-
Cutting of the wood for the main altar in the
Temple was completed for
the year.
-
King Hoshea of
the
northern kingdom removed
the sentries on the road leading to Jerusalem, allowing the
ten tribes to
once again have access to the
Temple.
-
The nights, traditionally the ideal time for
Torah study, are
lengthened again after the summer
solstice,
permitting more study.
-
The Roman occupiers permitted burial of the victims of the
massacre at
Bethar during the
Bar Kochba rebellion.
Miraculously, the bodies had not decomposed, despite exposure
to the elements for over a year.
Source: Wikipedia, Chabad.org
YBIC
Bruce Baber