Tu B’Av, as a holiday of joy and lovemaking, represents the ultimate rise from mourning and embrace of life and its bounty, with gratitude for our own capacity for love itself.
How do we at once throw our arms around our children, up in protest, and open to our neighbors?
How do we speak in one breath, “Our brothers’ blood cries out from the earth,” “These guns must be stopped,” “It is not Islam that is to blame,” “To take one life
On Shavuot, every spring, we return to Sinai. We stand at the foot of the mountain enveloped in cloud and fire, the mountain hanging over our heads as if dangling from the Heavens themselves1, and we accept the Torah that was given to us when we assembled
When you have come into the land
that the Eternal your God is giving to you as a heritage,
and you have possessed it and settled there,
you shall take from among all the first fruits of the ground
that you bring forth from your land-
which the Eternal your