A time for love

The Tu Be’av dance festival in the settlement of Shiloh evokes the dances of maidens in Talmudic times.

By SAM SOKOL
A Time for Love (521) (photo credit: Courtesy)
A Time for Love (521)
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The women spin and gyrate, their white frocks lifting gracefully in the air as they clasp hands and dance in a circle, their heads held high, light-hearted laughs escaping their throats.
The setting is a vineyard outside of Shiloh, a West Bank community that thousands of years ago served as the first capital of the Israelites. The day is Tu Be’av, the 15th of the Hebrew month of Av, a date celebrated in contemporary Israel as a Jewish version of St. Valentine’s Day.
The women are here today for the fourth annual Meholelot Bakramim (literally “dancing in the vineyards”) – Jewish Dance and Music Festival for Women.
Women from all over the country – religious and secular, modern and haredi – have gathered together to bond over music and dance in commemoration of when, during the times of the biblical Tabernacle, “women would come from all over the country, dressed in white, to dance and sing in the vineyards of Shiloh,” according to the promotional material for the event.
The event, which last year was attended by 1,500 women, consists of three hours of dance workshops in genres as diverse as folk, Moroccan, African and hip-hop, followed by the “dancing in the vineyards” to a concert featuring both secular and religious entertainers. This year, the event is headlined by Ronit Shahar and Kochav Nolad winner Roni Dalumi.
IRONICALLY, THIS event, meant to empower women, originated in part with the brutal rape, murder and dismemberment of a concubine over 3,000 years ago, says Tzofia Dorot, a spokeswoman for the Tel Shiloh Heritage Site.
In the end of the book of Judges, says Dorot, is the narrative of the concubine of Gibeah. This woman “was raped and murdered and after that, when people from the tribe of Benjamin did not want to give her up, a big civil war started with thousands of people killed.”
After intense internecine fighting, almost the entire tribe of Benjamin was wiped out in a horrific genocide, leaving only 600 males left alive, according to the text.
Moreover, recounts Dorot, “the whole nation swore that they were never going to give their daughters to the tribe of Benjamin and that the war would serve as the end of this tribe.”
However, the leaders of the nation began to feel remorse and decided to bring their daughters to Shiloh, says Dorot. Mixing the remaining Benjaminites among the throngs of men who came to find wives during the dancing on this day, the elders of Israel ensured the continuation of the nearly wiped-out tribe.
In fact, Dorot says, one of the reasons given in Jewish tradition for the celebration of Tu Be’av is that upon entering the land of Canaan from the desert, the 12 Israelite tribes were permitted to intermarry and, centuries later in Shiloh, the perpetuation of the tribe of Benjamin was ensured on that day.
“That is one of the reasons why they celebrated Tu Be’av every summer during the time they brought in the grapes. The girls used to go up to the vineyards dressed in white and the boys would pick their wives,” she explains.
“So what they said was, ‘Let’s bring them to Shiloh, where the holiday is celebrated, and they will mix with the crowd and that’s how they will have a continuation.’ In the end of this story, we have the tribe of Benjamin continuing until today – thanks to the girls who came to celebrate that holiday and later married them.”
“The idea of the women’s dance festival,” she says, “is not only about religious women dancing freely. The idea of the dance festival is that women have the ability to connect between people today as they did on Tu Be’av to the tribe of Benjamin 3,000 years ago. Women have the ability to connect to other people that are very different from them.”
This festival, Dorot, explains, is all about “taking the message from the Bible into our times.”
This event aims to “bring back the tradition of Tu Be’av in order to tell people that love is not [just] you and your husband and that’s the end of it. Love is much bigger than that; it's the whole nation.”
The biblical narrative of the concubine whose murder sparked a brutal civil war and the reconciliation that followed, informed the choice to produce this event and to try and disseminate what its organizers view as the “real message of the Jewish holiday,” which Dorot sees as “love between people and between the various groups of people who make up the Jewish nation.“ As opposed to the Jewish version of Valentine’s Day that it has become, Dorot says, she aims to help make Tu Be’av “about the continuation of the nation.”
“It’s about us and the Land of Israel. It’s not like Valentine’s Day, it’s totally different.”
THERE ARE more similarities to Valentine’s Day than she admitted, however. All references to civil war and genocide aside, the observance of Tu Be’av, an admittedly minor holiday today, grew in importance during the Talmudic period, roughly corresponding to the period of Roman rule two millennia ago.
During the time of the Second Temple and the Talmudic sages, the women of Jerusalem, the city that had taken over pride of place as capital from Shiloh, would go out into the fields and dance at the commencement of the grape harvest, all dressed in simple white clothes to hide their social status, in order to attract a mate.
In fact, the Talmud states that there were no happier dates than those of Tu Be’av and the fast of Yom Kippur, which marked the end of the harvest and a day on which the women would also dance.
While the tradition of religiously observant Jewish women dancing in public, or at least in mixed company, is now frowned upon in Orthodox society, the idea of bringing back Tu Be’av as a day dedicated to love was seen in a positive light by adherents of secular Zionism wishing to bring back aspects of ancient Jewish sovereignty, although not necessarily with all of their religious baggage.
With the Orthodox community now coming on board, it seems that Tu Be’av has a real chance of regaining something of its religiously oriented romance.
Now it only remains for men to be allowed to attend.