This was my D’var Torah for our Pride Shabbat on August 9, 2025, which was Shabbat Nachamu and Tu B’Av, a celebration and calendar date explained within. I’m publishing it now to catch up on words of Torah I’ve previously taught, in anticipation of our next Pride Shabbat this coming Saturday, October 31, 2026.
The reason that today is our Pride Shabbat is because of possibly the most obscure Jewish holiday, which is Tu B’Av, the fifteenth of Av. It’s sometimes known as the “Jewish Valentine’s Day” but that gives you just a very vague hint of what Tu B’Av is. I pitched this to Liz, because we wanted something after Pride Month to extend our Pride focus, but not too far off, and a theme of love coupled with this Av season of reconstruction and teshuvah seemed appropriate.
This year in particular, the stories associated with Tu B’Av give us something we can take it and jump off from as we mark Pride Shabbat this particular year. Like Shabbat Nachamu, like Parashat Va’etchanan, Tu B’Av is its own kind of response to what’s broken in the world and what is emerging.
On the one hand, this has been a decade overall when queer creativity and teaching and presence have never been more bountiful, particularly in the Jewish world.
And on the other hand, it is a year when so much about queer lives is under attack by our governments and their leaders, from the health of Trans people to the legal foundations of gay marriages, from the ability of young LGBTQ+ people to be who they are in schools safely, with their own names, to the squelching of narratives of equality in public and even private spaces.
So what can Tu B’Av give us to use right now? Let’s start with what the Talmud says about this day.
Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel taught that in Temple times the two most joyous days of the year were not Purim and Simchat Torah, but Yom Kippur and Tu B’Av. On both days in the afternoon, the young women of Yerushalayim would go out dressed in white, and every one would borrow clothes so no one could tell who came from what kind of wealth or status. They would call out to the young men, and say: Do not look for physical beauty, look deeper – for a good family, for a good soul, for a deep integrity.
This was six days after Tisha B’Av, six days after spiritual rock bottom. Tu B’Av falls at the start of a time that calls on us to be brutally honesty with ourselves, and our collectives. Rabbi Sharon Brous has taught that this kind of work is what enables us to present ourselves with spiritual joy to a potential lover, a potential friend. It’s what earns us the right to put on the simple, pure, equal clothing, and say: This is me, this is the best of me because I can tell you honestly also the worst of me. And I want to see the best of you too, and I’m willing to see the worst and still love you. That’s where joy comes from on Tu B’Av, from radical honesty and vulnerability and acceptance.
That’s the most well-known description of Tu B’Av, if you can say that anything about it is well known. But there is almost an exact mirror image of that also in the Talmud. Which is that Tu B’Av in Torah times was the day each year when the decree about the people of the generation of the desert dying off would come true. For 37 years, those deaths would all happen on the same day. I think the Talmud mean only that day of the year, and as Tu B’Av approached anyone who was still alive from Mitzrayim would wonder if they were about to die.
But in the fortieth year on the 15th of Av, every single person woke up and was still alive, and everyone around them was still alive.
What life must have meant that day, and love, and destiny, on that Tu B’Av when everything for everyone went from mourning to joy, miyagon l’simcha.
And that particular 15th of Av, the Talmud also says that God broke a silence of 37 years, a mournful silence when God almost couldn’t dare to teach anything new while people were dying. Finally God spoke to Moshe once again with words of instruction for the people who were now ready to move forward.
That day women who owned land were permitted by law to marry outside their own tribe. Recall the five daughters of Tzelophechad, who had petitioned Moshe and the other leaders that their family be allowed a land holding in the promised land even though there was no brother to inherit from their father, and God told Moshe that their request was the law. But when the men of their tribe of Menashe then protested that this would result in a loss of property, that their territory would follow these women to another tribe, the law retreated. And women in the position of the five daughters could keep their family land only if they married within the tribe.
On Tu B’Av in year 40 of the wilderness, this legal backtracking came to an end. The injunction was lifted; the compromise was overruled. Women became more free. The barriers between all tribes became lower.
Speaking of barriers and boundaries, centuries later on another Tu B’Av, the Israelite King Hoshea, who was not a good king at all, removed physical roadblocks that his royal ancestors had constructed to prevent the northern tribes from making pilgrimage to the House of God in Jerusalem, which was in the Kingdom of Judah. He proclaimed: Anyone who wishes can now go up. I won’t tell anyone where they can and cannot worship. Anyone who wants can ascend together.
These Talmudic tales of Tu B’Av are each built on something heartbreaking, something honest, and something hopeful. What is heartbreaking most of all is dying. What’s heartbreaking imperfection in the law, especially after the law has been more glorious. It’s remembering bad history and that not all the bad is because of someone else in history, some of it is our own flaws.
What’s honest is acknowledging that even Moshe’s laws were broken, as the tablets had to be before they could be remade. Even when manna came from the sky some people died, and it would take time and growth and grace for things to be better. Being honest about all this is made easier by sharing. Putting on the same clothing on the same day, coming to pray and sing together, acknowledging our wrongs in the same season, letting each other know all at once that we are lovable and loved.
And as for Tu B’Av hope, it’s an honest kind of hope. None of these changes the Talmud pins to the 15th of Av is the whole ball of wax — but each of them was a step toward the promised land or a better promised land.
Tu B’Av is about the first little bit of teshuvah, correcting one thing – one rule, one barrier, one flaw. It’s making one connection as lovers or friends. Tu B’Av is not Yom Kippur; it’s not the complete cleansing, a year of complete good within our grasp.
That seems right for where we are now. Pride celebrations, in their short history, have usually been exuberant times, but this year that exuberance has been mixed with fear and defiance. How can we right now capture Tu B’Av’s mix of heartbreak and honesty and hope. How do we link the white borrowed garments of this smaller holiday, to the ambitious transformation of Yom Kippur?
One thing it’s important to do is to trace our own history, right here at Beth Abraham, of one change and then another.
When I began my rabbinate here seventeen years ago, I wasn’t ready to perform gay weddings. But when our state considered making that legal in 2009, I changed my mind. What made the first difference in this community, I think, was the courage of people here who were the parents of adult gay and lesbian children, parents who began to share with me and then with peers how hard it had been to talk about their LGBTQ+ kids in this community that was striving to be egalitarian. It’s them — it’s you — who helped more of us listen.
I began to speak to legislators, to teach them that when someone said the Bible forbids same-sex relationships, they weren’t speaking for everyone who cherishes the Bible. We had people in the legislature who were Jewish, members here or people who listened to members here. So when marriage equality passed in New Hampshire, this community can say we had something do with it. Three years later legislators tried to repeal it, and communities including ours had something to do with the failure of that effort.
Culture is defined by the accumulation of small things, and in 2014 we began to change our official forms so that couples were not husband and wife but adult 1 and adult 2. We owe that to the initiative of new members, straight allies in fact, who came in with fresh eyes.
In 2015, ten years ago, having same-sex marriages in this synagogue became our official policy.
In the late 2010s the kids in our Religious School began talking openly about sexual orientation when we gave them the chance to pick a tzedakah or a change issue to invest in.
Four years ago we had our first annual Pride Shabbat, and I believe three years ago we participated for the first time in Nashua’s Pride Parade and Festival. Doing so also pushed us to new ideas about what we would do as a shul on Shabbat outside the synagogue, and our Ritual Committee and Board approved policies enabling us within the halacha of Shabbat to represent the Jewish community this way. Our presence has made an impact not only on Jews who find us, but on non-Jews as well. This year someone came to our booth to thank us for adding our strength to collective faith presence at Nashua’s Pride events.
We have had speakers the past few years and trainings from Keshet, the Boston-based Jewish LGBTQ+ organization. Last fall, Sarit and Liz and I followed up by doing an audit of our congregation and organization, and beginning to map out some more education we might need and our leadership and educators might need and I certainly need. I have been with other faith leaders in Concord, standing side by side, in an unsuccessful to prevent our legislators from depriving our Trans youth of the care they need.
This past year we welcomed as our scholar-in-residence rabbinic student Ariel Dunat, who showed us how queer experience and queer theory can enrich our Torah, by teaching us about the halacha of conversion for Transgender people. We have enriched our library of queer Jewish books.
Just yesterday, I put the signs up to indicate we have an all-gender restroom available.
When it comes to queer Jewish lives, whether it’s living or celebrating or protecting, we are so lucky to have among us courageous individuals, incredible parents, professionals in fields of gender-affirming care. We are fortunate to have people like Liz who not only focus us and teach us, but are leaders whether it’s Pride Month or Pride Shabbat or anything we are doing as the Jewish community. I am myself a cisgender straight male, but I have come to understand better that Pride is both about being an ally to others, and also about me and about all of us.
Our world right now looks a lot more like the day after Tu B’Av than the day after Yom Kippur. We grieve; we look at laws in need of repair. We have much still to seek and we are not blowing a shofar at the end of our services today. But Tu B’Av means we don’t have to wait to don the garments of equals, which we share in all the colors of the rainbow, and every last one of us offer our unique beauty – our souls, our integrity. To one other person, to our communities, to the world. Out of that, one by one we will save lives and rebuild our laws. Out of that we show every single person that they are loved.
Shabbat Shalom!
Leave a Reply