The Virgin Dance of Yom Kippur

Bernardino Luini, Girls Bathing, 1520-23. Fresco transferred to canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

On Monday, right after I came back from Manhattan, I got a craving for a smoothie. I headed to the Taste Coffee House in Newton. Smoothies made by the owner Nick are the natural goodness of ice, yogurt and fruit with no thickeners or sugar to spoil the authentic experience of the long and tall glass. In the coffee house was Tova Mervis, typing away on her Mac, this time for the Tu B’Av post in the Tablet Magazine. Tova’s article raises the obligatory Tu B’Av question on how we lost the dancing in the fields mating ritual or as Tova deftly puts it – “is the hardening of divisions within the Orthodox world making dating impossible?” Tova referrers to the “legend” of Tu B’Av, actually this is a Mishnah (Ta’anit 4:8) and people prefer to sweep under the artificial turf the second part of that Mishnah:

“Rabban Shimon Ben Gamliel stated, “Israel had no holidays as joyous as Tu B’Av and Yom HaKippurim, when the young women of Jerusalem would go out and dance in the vineyards…”

Turns out the mating dance was not only on Tu B’Av but also, gasp, on Yom Kippur. Suddenly the challenge to Tu B’Av becomes a much more interesting inquiry on how did we lose the dance rave of Yom Kippur? To the orthodox ear this seems such a shocking and incomprehensible Yom Kippur custom. But actually if we trace the loss of that spirit, we would much better understand the tragic predicament of a boy meets a girl on the corner of Amsterdam and 73rd.

Contrary to 2000 years of the puritan casuistic, the joy of Yom Kippur mirrors every mythology, the purification, the new frontiers, the renewal is appropriately inseparable from the conquest of the virgin white territory, complete with the vineyards as a universal metaphor for the Dionysian intoxication of love. The hint of that spirit survived to this day in the Jewish wedding, seen as Simchas Torah and Yom Kippur all at once. The central impasse is not who took Tu B’Av out of Tu B’Av but rather who took Tu B’Av out of Yom Kippur? I suspect the answer to the traditional lamentations on full moon day in august is in the latter question.

I spoke about the same on the full moon day of the spring – What would Rabbi Akiva do?

Image published with permission of the Web Gallery of Art