What is the happiest day of the year?
The Mishnah in Ta’anit has the answer: Yom Kippur and Tu B’Av. The Gemara there (30b) explains why Yom Kippur earns this distinction – we achieve atonement and forgiveness for all our sins. But why is the fifteenth of Av a happy day? The Gemara offers six reasons, drawn from events that occurred on this date across history. Looking for their overarching theme helps us understand the nature of the day.
The first reason is that the Jewish people were permitted for the first time to marry across tribes, having been restricted since the desert years to marrying within their own tribes. The second is that the tribe of Binyamin was permitted to marry within the Jewish people once again, following the national tragedy of the concubine at Givah at the close of Sefer Shoftim, which had ended with an oath forbidding intermarriage with Binyamin. Both events represent the reunification of the Jewish people after periods of strife, expressed through the cementing of bonds between tribes through marriage.
The third reason is that on this day, the Jews in the desert realized that the last of those condemned to die there had finally passed away. Each Tisha B’Av, Rashi tells us, they would dig graves and sleep in them. Those who woke in the morning knew they had been granted another year. In the fortieth year, everyone woke. Assuming they had simply miscalculated the date, they waited – and only when the full moon rose on the fifteenth of Av did they grasp the truth: the decree was over, and they would all live to enter the Promised Land.
The fourth reason is that King Hoshea ben Ela dismantled the military checkpoints that Yarovam ben Nevat had set up over 200 years earlier to prevent Jews from making the pilgrimage to the Beit HaMikdash in Jerusalem. People could now choose for themselves between Jerusalem and the golden calves. Both of these reasons represent, at best, incomplete happiness. The end of dying in the desert closes a tragic chapter rather than opening a triumphant one, and the mere removal of a barrier to G-d’s service is hardly cause for celebration in itself.
The fifth reason is that Tu B’Av was the day those killed in Beitar during the Bar Kochba rebellion were finally permitted burial, after the Romans had refused to allow this since the fall of Beitar on Tisha B’Av, until a new Emporer came into power (Jerusalem Talmud, Ta’anit 4:5). When the survivors found the bodies miraculously intact, the blessing of hatov v’hameitiv in Birkat HaMazon was instituted to express gratitude for this.
Burying the dead from a failed rebellion that cemented our lack of independence until the modern State of Israel seems, at first glance, a strange reason for the happiest day of the year. But our recent experience with the return of the hostages this past Sukkot can help us understand this unique kind of joy. We rejoiced especially at the return of the living; but we also gave deep thanks for the return of those who were murdered, allowing their families to bury them in kever Yisrael. Many of us said Baruch hatov v’hameitiv that day.
The final reason is that Tu B’Av was the last day wood donations were brought to the Beit HaMikdash for the fire on the mizbei’ach. The mizbei’ach was G-d’s table; in its absence, our own table – where we welcome guests – serves as its counterpart in our homes.
What do these reasons share? They are not simply anniversaries of joyous occasions. They are small steps in longer processes, partial or full remedies for difficult realities, completions of painful chapters. They remind us that bittersweet victories are worth celebrating, and that hope itself deserves to be honored.
Tu B’Av carries a romantic quality through its connection to marriage in the first two reasons, but its deeper romance lies in something larger. Each of the Gemara’s reasons invites us to look honestly at difficulty and loss, and find within that very moment a reason to rejoice. Not because everything is resolved or the story has ended well, but because something real has shifted, something has opened. The capacity to celebrate the incomplete, to mark the partial victory, to look ahead with genuine optimism, may be the most distinctly Jewish form of joy there is. Tu B’Av does not erase the past. It simply insists on the future.
Rabbanit Sally Mayer is Rosh Midrasha of Ohr Torah Stone’s Midreshet Lindenbaum.