Everyone knows it as the day of love. It is really a day about what is already working in your life while you are busy insisting that nothing is.
Six days. That is the entire distance between Tisha B'Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, and Tu B'Av, which the Mishnah calls one of the two happiest days of the year.
Gallery
Nachman (Nathan) Hoffman met his wife due to the beard he grew to prove blessings don't work
(Photo: Private album)
Six days from mourning the destruction of everything to dancing in the vineyards.
I think about that number a lot.
The Mishnah describes what the day looked like. The young women of Jerusalem would go out to the vineyards in white dresses. Every single dress was borrowed. Even the women who owned beautiful clothes of their own borrowed, so that no woman without them would feel exposed.
For one day, nobody could tell who came from money and who did not. Who had a name and who was still building one.
Everything people use to rank each other came off. And that is when the matches were made.
Now let me tell you about my beard.
Years ago, before I was married, I heard that growing a beard during a certain period on the calendar carried some kind of blessing. I thought that was nonsense. I was on my way in, but I still saw the world in cause and effect and evidence.
So I told a friend I would grow it. Not out of faith. Out of stubbornness. I said I would grow it the full 50 days and prove to him that absolutely nothing would happen.
Fifty days later, nothing had happened. I shaved it off. I told him I was right.
I was not right.
Somewhere during those 50 days, a photograph was taken of me with that beard. That photograph made its way in front of a woman I had never met, in a house I had never been to. She looked at the picture and said, this is the man for my daughter.
She set us up.
That daughter is my wife. We have four children, seven years of age and younger with another, G-d willing, on the way. We live in Safed (Tzfat).
I am not telling you to grow a beard. I am telling you that you are a very poor judge of what is currently working in your life
During the war my wife cooked for 650 soldiers every Shabbat (1,300 meals) out of our kitchen. Not for a month. For two and a half years, while raising four kids under six, while the north was under fire.
All of it downstream of a beard I grew specifically to prove that blessings do not do anything.
Here is the part that still stops me. On the day I shaved it off, I was certain I had won the argument. I had evidence. Fifty days, zero results.
What I did not know was that the result had already happened. Weeks earlier. In a photograph. In a conversation I was not part of, in a room I had never stood in.
I was standing there announcing that nothing was working at the exact moment the most important thing in my life was being arranged.
The beard came back years later, and this time I kept it. I was at a conference in Israel with 10,000 people. I had watched a man speak from the stage and decided I had to meet him. I spotted him walking between sessions and started moving toward him. Before I could get a word out, he turned, looked at me, and said, 'I love your beard.'
That conversation led to an introduction. The introduction led to an event in the north. At that event I ran into someone I had worked with years earlier back in America. A few weeks later my phone rang with a number I did not recognize. I almost did not answer.
It was him. He had a CEO position for me.
I held that role for six years and got to help build the north of this country.
I am not telling you to grow a beard. I am telling you that you are a very poor judge of what is currently working in your life.
There is one more piece of Tu B'Av that almost nobody talks about.
The Gemara says that from the 15th of the Hebrew month of Av onward, the nights start getting longer, and from this day a person adds to his learning. Add. Not restart. Not overhaul. Not wait for the shofar.
From tonight, you add one thing.
That is the design of this whole season, and it is beautiful once you see it. Tisha B'Av breaks you open. Six days later Tu B'Av tells you the pieces are already being put back together whether or not you can see it happening. And then it hands you a job. Add something. Tonight. Fifteen days before Elul even begins, while everyone else is waiting for a better starting line.
This year Av was heavy again. It has been heavy here for a while.
But that is exactly the argument Tu B'Av makes. Six days. Borrowed dresses. Every barrier down. Matches being made in the dark while people are convinced that nothing is happening.
Do your part. Release the outcome. Add one thing tonight.
You do not get to see the wiring while it is being installed.
Only Up.
Nachman (Nathan) Hoffman is the founder and CEO of Only Up, a leadership and coaching company based in Safed (Tzfat), Israel. He spent six years as a CEO building a major institution in the north and brings more than 20 years in business and personal development to the people and organizations he works with. He is also part of a new nonprofit working to build the future of Tzfat, including bringing AI development into the city.