The Hebrew month of Av is defined by two holidays. 

Tisha B’Av, the 9th, marks the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem—first by the Babylonians, then by the Romans—and has grown into an umbrella of grief for every tragedy that has befallen the Jewish people. The three weeks leading up to it are mournful: many Jews abstain from cutting hair, listening to live music, or holding celebrations like weddings. 

What follows is Tu B’Av, the 15th, a day of love. In ancient Jerusalem, maidens danced in white, celebrating friendship, partnership, and the bounty of the natural world at the height of the grape harvest. 

These two holidays, set just six days apart, hold two core truths of Jewish life: we will lose something unbearably dear—in this case the Temple, our gathering point and portal to the Divine—and we will insist on love anyway. The Jewish calendar forces us to see this in stark, beautiful ways. As the grief worker Francis Weller writes in The Wild Edge of Sorrow: “Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning.” 

May our hearts be open to both this month of Av—to fully grieving what was, and to building relationships of hope for what could be.