קרן ברג- טו' באב

A message from Karen Berg Tu B'Av Welcome to Tu B'av - the 15th day of the month of Av. Lot's of you that maybe familiar with the fact they call it 'the day of love'. It's a day when the maidens in Jerusalem went out to find their soulmates or arrange marriages on that day. All of that is true, but let's look at the beginnings of Tu B'Av. According to the Gemarah it says that the two holiest days of the year are Yom Kippur and Tu B'Av. That would be an interesting question, because we know that Yom Kippur it's a day of fasting and of concentration on spiritual energy, etc. and so forth. And here you have these maidens running widely free in Jerusalem looking for their mates or some people that are agents, marriage counselors making contracts. How do you put these two together and how do you explain it? Well, one of the things that we know is that that on 9th day of Av which is the day the spies came back from spying the land, and they told Moses: "Yeah, it's a land flowing with milk and honey. Look at the grapes, they are fantastic. But you know what? It's just too difficult. These giants are going to destroy us. We will not be able to overcome their power. We will not be able to enter the land. And when the people, because there were only two others that said otherwise, it was Joshua and Kaleb. They said: "No, no , no ,no, we will go anyway. We will go with the word of the Creator. But ten against two is a hard number. And when the people heard what the spies had to say, they cried and they cried. And so when the Creator heard upstairs, and it's a lesson for us by the way, wailing of the people, he says: "You are crying for this? Then you will have a day of crying for every single year on this day there will be wailing. We have found that the 9th day of Av would be a day of wailing. And as history shows us, we have the 1st Temple, the 2nd Temple, the expulsion from Spain, final redemption, spies coming back. We also know that in the desert, when Moses went up to receive the first Tablets, and supposedly didn't come down within a lot of time, the people created the Golden Calf. And he went up again on the first day of the month of Elul to receive the second Tablets, because the first ones when he came back down, they were totally destroyed, because the people have lost their faith in the Creator. But when did he come down the second time forty days later? It was actually on Yom Kippur. And knowing that he was able to bring the Tablets down on Yom Kippur, he understood that that was the day that they would be forgiven for what they had done. And through the history of time as Tishah B'Av was the day of morning, Yom Kippur became a day of forgiveness. And therefore, through the history we will find that Yom Kippur was the day when Jews not celebrating in the form that we understand it, but like angels, they did't eat, they just were part of a union with the holy one, with the Creator. They were like the angels of heaven. And so it is to be on Yom Kippur. How do I correlate that to Tu B'Av? When the spies came back and gave this evil report, the Creator said: "When you said that you will never be able to inherit the land, so be it. I guarantee you that the generation that will follow you will inherit the land. And the two people that gave the good report, Kaleb and Yehoshua, they will enter the holy land. But you, and all of you of this generation will die in the wilderness. So what happened? It's said that every year on Tu B'Av, now if you take 600 thousand people, divide it into 40 - 15,000 people each year died on the 15th day of the month. But what happens is for 40 years, and in the 40th year in the wilderness they sort of made, they built their own graves and lied themselves down knowing that they would die. And lo and behold, they didn't die. And the next day, and the next day, and the next day and they realized that it was a miracle, that God had finally forgiven the generation in the wilderness. And what day was it that they finally realized from the first day which is Tishah B'Av, the first 9th day of the month of Av, it was on the 15th of the month, when they saw that the moon was full, that they realized that they too had been forgiven for the spies. And so we see that Tu B'Av is a time of forgiveness. Also withing this period, when this happened, the celebration was so great, before that the tribes would marry only a tribe: Benymin with Benyamin, Shimon with Shimon, and Dan with Dan, as we know the tribes. But at this time they were given permission to intermarry withing the tribes. Before that they weren't allowed to do that. because the inheritance of the fathers' houses was to be withing the houses, but now They decided that they would be able to lo and behold, intermarry into the tribes. So therefore, there was a bigger pool of being able to fulfill. And so this was a time of happiness. And from this was derived the time of being the time of love: the love of the Creator to his people, the love of being able to intermingle and marry within the tribes. And yes, the end result of that was that the people, the marriage makers, the contractors, what they did on that day they arranged contracts - marriages between men and women. And for us today, of course, we don't run the streets of Jerusalem wearing white on the 15th of the month, but it is a day of love and joy. And I hope for all of you that have listened that you enjoy this day, it's a beautiful one. Thank you!