I LOVE Tu B'av!! Tu B'av is NOT a Jewish Valentines Day. I recently saw that an Orthodox-identifying rabbi was asked on a website if it is permitted for a Jew to celebrate Valentines Day and he answered in the affirmative, that it is FINE to celebrate. I can TOTALLY hear that 😊 - if he had much too much to drink - a whole bottle of whiskey will do that to you - or was on a SERIOUS acid trip when he wrote that. I mean it is vacation period and people are going on LOTS of trips! How can it be permitted to celebrate a Christian holiday?? Like - we have our own religion, thank you...
But Tu B'av is also [in a very different way] a religion of love and mating. SO REFRESHING! The girls would go out to the vineyards, dance and the single boys would come and choose a bride. "Chik chak" ["speedy" in Latin]. No endless phone calls finding out private and often negative information about other people and families, no resumes, no long courtships that often break up before marriage, no girls sitting at home depressed that they can't get a date, no plastic surgery, makeup artists for single girls, boys demanding a picture [not just a face shot רח"ל...] and then deciding before they speak to her for 3 seconds that she is not up to par. No shidduch crisis! NO MONEY FIGHTS!!! Go to the vineyard, find a girl [wearing the same white dress as every other girl, as the Gemara says], get a rabbi and two witnesses [a minyan for the sheva brachos] and SHOIN - make it work. Love is a verb. Act loving and you will start feeling it.
I am not suggesting that we change the shidduch system [flawed as it may be]. I am not a revolutionary. There are definitely benefits to the system. Today the average boy or girl needs to date the person before they are ready to marry them. We also need the detective stick-your-nose-in-other-peoples-private-lives because it is downright dangerous today to marry someone you haven't investigated. He or she could be on drugs or have severe mental illness he is not treating or many other problems. He might even read this blog ח"ו. His hero might be Mike Tyson. She might be an obsessive shopper who swipes and swipes until every credit card company has her blacklisted. WHO KNOWS!! So let things continue as they are.
BUT [big "but"], after 25 years of marriage [in a week and a half] and having known countless couples, I can say this: When you marry the person you THINK that you know them but you really don't. You may think you marrying the girl/boy of your dreams but the dream is a fantasy. The real person is someone you only find out about months and years after the wedding. It takes a lot of hard work to create a successful union and that applies to ANYONE you marry because there will ALWAYS be points of conflict.
So people date and date and date thinking that they will find that perfect person but that perfect person DOESN'T exist. She only exists in Hollywood. Of course, there has not been an actress in the history of movie making who had a life long stable relationship - but that is besides the point.
I will leave you with a question: Why are the girls dancing in the vineyards??? The Mishna [Taanis 26] says that it was a YOM TOV and the Gemara [30] gives six reasons for the joy of this day. But NOWHERE in the Gemara are we told why this joy is expressed with girls, dancing and shidduchim. [One of the reasons for the Yom Tov is that the dead of Beitar who were killed in the revolution were buried. What does that have to do with girls and vineyards??] And not only on Tu B'av but on YOM KIPPUR they would dance!!
Try THAT ONE on the Eidah Hachareidis....
