Tu B'Av: A love of life and of Israel - opinion

Perhaps it’s because I am not in a relationship, but I never really felt connected to Tu B’Av, the Jewish “holiday of love,” which falls today.

The Mishna states that “there were no days more joyous than the 15th of Av (Tu B’Av) and Yom Kippur.” The Talmud goes on to cite various reasons for the minor festival, but the first one, if you take the events chronologically, is simply too morbid for my taste.

According to Wikipedia, “At the end of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness, the last remnant of the generation of the sin of the spies, which had been forbidden from entering the Promised Land, found that they were not destined to die. For 40 years, every Tisha B’av the Israelites made graves for themselves in which they slept expecting to be their last night; every year a proportion of them died. In the 40th year, the 15,000 who had remained from the first generation went to sleep in the graves and woke up the next day to their surprise. Thinking they made a mistake with the date, they kept sleeping in graves until they reached Tu B’Av and saw a full moon. Only then did they know they were going to enter the Land of Israel with the new generation.”

Rising up from graves? It sounds more like Halloween than a Jewish Valentine’s Day. Or in the words of the recently departed rock icon Tina Turner, “What’s love got to do with it?”

A personal Tu B'Av story

Allow me to share a very personal story. I am 51, and consider myself to be in pretty good health because besides being overweight, (although I have lost 9 kilos, nearly 20 pounds, over the last seven weeks), I rarely get sick. But a few months ago, I started having urinary problems, which I assumed was a stone and possibly a prostate issue – I was right on both counts - but I never imagined what was lurking.

My urologist sent me to do an ultrasound and then a CT which both revealed a shocking revelation, my right kidney had a huge (nearly 10cm) mass which needed to be taken care of urgently.

To make a long story short, last month a surgeon at Sheba Medical Center removed my entire right kidney and the mass as well. The subsequent pathology report revealed that the growth was indeed malignant, an aggressive cancer of the highest grade, but fortunately they succeeded in removing it all and the treatment going forward will only be preventative. It’s amazing that this mass, which had obviously been there for quite a long while, was discovered due to an unrelated kidney stone.

AS I CONTINUE on my path to full recovery, I can’t help but contemplate the story of that last group of surviving Israelites in their 40th year in the wilderness. Why did they continue to lie down in those graves for a whole week from the eve of the 9th of Av till they saw the full moon on the 15th?

I am reminded of a scene from the 1993 comedy film Wayne’s World 2 in which our heroes Wayne and Garth come face to face with Aerosmith before the band is about to perform. As they do whenever they meet rock stars, the duo immediately prostates themselves, extending their arms as they bow to the floor chanting their trademark, “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!” to which a very embarrassed and annoyed Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler responds, “You’re worthy. You’re worthy. Get up!”

This must be how those final 15,000 Israelites felt, unworthy of God’s mercy. It took them a full week to realize that God had forgiven them and the decree issued 40 years previously was now over. Just like Steven Tyler told Wayne and Garth, God was letting them know that they were worthy and it was time to get up out of their self-dug graves and join the new generation entering the land of Israel.

So, perhaps the “love” of Tu B’Av, at least taken in the context of this story, is two-fold. First, there is the love of being alive, or as the pithy Hebrew bumper sticker reads, “Baruch Hashem, ani noshem” (“Thank God, I’m breathing”), and secondly, the love of being able to live in the land of Israel.

My late father Yaacov Sredni, whose eighth yartzeit we marked this Monday, the 13th of Av, loved Israel with a great passion. Although he grew up in Mexico City and raised his family in northern California, he felt most fulfilled after he had built a home in Israel and officially made Aliyah.

In the winter of 2015, about four months after he passed, my mother got a call from a neighbor asking if she had seen the walls of the local Bnei Akiva chapter which the neighborhood kids had painted for their annual Shabbat Irgun. My mother had not so she was sent a photograph which featured a quote of my late father that one of the Bnei Akiva kids had painted on the wall.

Every year the walls get painted over by a different group of kids, but the photo, now framed, is still with us and the quote hangs on the walls of all my sibling’s homes. It is a quote that we never actually heard him say, but he must have said it as it captures his essence perfectly, and the dual Tu B’Av message of love of being alive and love of living in Israel.

“Each morning when I walk out to the street, I look around, smile and say, ‘Boker Tov, Eretz Yisrael.’”

As I try to come to terms with all that has happened to me over the past two months, I am overwhelmed by the feeling that I am simply not worthy of all the medical miracles I have experienced, but then I quickly snap out of it as I hear the no-nonsense tone of my late father’s voice, “Yonatan, you’re worthy. Now get up!”

The writer is a journalist at CTech.