‘You Shall Love’ - The Jewish Standard

This is a bleak time on the Jewish calendar. The Three Weeks of mourning — this year that started on July 2 — lead into the Nine Days — that started on Wednesday, the 16th — and lead into Tisha B’Av, the lowest point of the year, when we remember tragedy and grief as we bake in the relentless high summer heat.

This is a particularly bleak time in Israel, in the United States, and in the world, so it’s not like we can look anywhere else for much joy.

But the Jewish year does not just lead us down into the absolute depths of despair. It shows us a way forward.

Enter Tu B’Av.

What’s that?

It’s the day of love. It’s a day for romance, for matchmaking, for dressing in white and dancing in the fields, for wandering under a full moon, for poetry and wonder.

It’s a day to celebrate all kinds of love, not only romantic but also platonic, parental, familial. Just six days after Tisha B’Av, it is a day of joy.

It’s also not very well known. It’s a minor holiday. But the Academy for Jewish Religion, in Yonkers, has put out a book of short essays, poems, and musings about Tu B’Av, an offering of light in the darkness around us. “You Shall Love: A Tu B’Av Supplement” is available for download, free, on AJR’s website, ajr.edu; it’s also for sale, as a bound book, from Amazon.

“This really came from a feeling that we are getting hit by hate in so many ways, certainly as a Jewish community but not only as a Jewish community,” Ora Horn Prouser of Teaneck, AJR’s president, said. “There’s antisemitism. There’s racism, there’s homophobia, there’s xenophobia. And it’s become so much more acceptable to speak in hateful ways.

“So we” — that’s Dr. Prouser and Rabbi Menachem Creditor, her co-editor — “were thinking about how great it would be just to focus on love.

“Tu B’Av is a day in the Jewish calendar, and it doesn’t have a formal structure or a ton of traditions. It’s a beautiful thing, and I think that people are trying to create different ways to have it mean different things.

“So we thought, why not just focus on love? Whether it’s love in interpersonal relationships or love of Judaism or love of Israel or love of Torah. There are so much different kinds of love here in this book.”

Which are her favorite pieces? No, that’s an unfair question. What are the most representative?

“One that I found very moving is by Rabbi Steven Rubinstein — an AJR alum! — about loving a spouse with Alzheimer’s,” she said. It’s an essay, called “All Right,” that begins with the story of a ring his wife bought him, a Solomon’s ring, that reminds you that whether it’s good fortune or foul, “this too shall pass.”

“It’s a very personal piece, very deep and very beautiful, about a model of a kind of love and how to express love.”

Dr. Prouser mentioned an essay by Chazan Rob Menes, “Presence,” where “he talks about love as presence,” she said. It’s about a relationship he developed, through being fully present over time, with music, with a wordless patient in a nursing home. “It’s interesting to think about how many of these entries are about love in the context of hospitals and hospice care and nursing homes,” she said. “If you had asked me before we got these pieces if that would be a big part of it, I wouldn’t have said yes. But they’re beautiful.”

Dr. Prouser’s husband, Joseph Prouser, a Conservative rabbi who is also a deep student of American history — he has, among many other things, translated the Gettysburg Address into Hebrew and set it haftarah trope, which, it turns out, is a natural place for it — takes a macabre talmudic text about Tisha B’Av and turns into a glorious introduction to Tu B’Av. (The text is about how the Israelites would dig graves for themselves and sleep in them on Tisha B’Av, because 15,000 of them would die that night. The others would rise from their graves, bury their dead, and soldier on. That happened for 40 years, but the next year no one died; the Israelites were in such disbelief that they assumed they’d miscalculated, and slept in their graves the next night too, just in case. But again every woke up the next morning, and the community realized that God’s command that a whole generation would die in the wilderness was fulfilled.)

And then Rabbi Prouser ties that story, using step-by-step logic, to John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,” Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial, and our need for “public leaders and elected officials who prefer honor to honors.”

In another piece that Dr. Prouser recommended, Rabbi Enid Lader, in a poem called “They Sang ‘All You Need Is Love,’” considers the truth of that phrase, goes on to consider whether the word “neighbor” could? should? be a verb, and ends by asking Tevye and Golde’s question: “If that’s not love, what is?”

These are far from the only essays and poems “and some that read more like prayers” that Dr. Prouser mentioned; in fact, she talked with joy about most of them, and that was only because time constrained her from discussing each one. Each has something different and often profound to offer. “It’s a real mix,” she said.

The supplements — AJR also has produced them for Purim, Tisha B’Av, and the High Holy Days, and it’s created two separate haggadot, one in 2024, in response to October 7, and one this year, centered on immigration, all free on the school’s website — show AJR’s values, Dr. Prouser said.

“AJR is pluralistic,” she continued. “We really believe in diversity. We hope that the values of pluralism and diversity and Zionism come through in all of our supplements. We are very happy to be able to provide them to the community.”

In her introduction to “You Shall Love,” Dr. Prouser writes about “the role of love in the Hebrew Bible.” She focuses on the way that God takes Israel out of Egypt, “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.” These phrases are often — and logically — read as synonymous, she said, but what if they’re not? What if they’re complementary? What if the strong hand still signifies overwhelming power, but the outstretched arm — maybe the other arm, maybe not — signals “kindness, compassion, and empathy,” comfort and love?

“I share this not only as a reading for exploration, but as a message for these times,” Dr. Prouser concluded. “While we cannot simply or easily fix the problem of living in a time with such expressions of hate, we can spend our time sharing love and searching for and finding love in places both expected and unexpected.”

Amen selah.

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