By Kali Rifkin Silverman

God’s laws are your wisdom before the eyes of the nations. Nations will say, ‘Who is this great nation? One that has a Deity near and available for the people. One that has righteous decrees and ordinances like this entire Torah.’ Only take heed and guard your soul exceedingly so you do not forget… Make your experiences known to your children and your children’s children.

Remember the day at Mount Sinai when God spoke to you out of the midst of fire. God commanded you to observe the Ten Commandments and God inscribed them upon two tablets of stone..."

You get the point. To which I have some more thoughts, obviously.

To "not add or subtract anything" would signify stagnation and a total lack of creativity and growth in our world. How do we combat this with our need to follow certain rules year after year? #ACAAccreditation

And here's a question I struggled with a lot as I left the movement (and still struggle with as you can tell): How are we to translate our experiences to our children (read: chanichim, tzvatim, movement)? It's one thing to transmit information: passwords to email accounts, where to find which document, organizational changes that were made and the basics of why they were made, but how do I explain to my successor (Hi Sara!) how I felt when I had to make that decision? And what we went through in dealing with that issue? And what exactly we did in Disney World (s/o OGC)?! How do we truly share our oh-so-intense real-time feelings and experiences in this youth movement in order to create long-lasting change?

And then, Moses goes into reciting The Ten Commandments, The Sh'ma and The Ve'ahavtah, i.e. the covenant between the Israelites and God. It's pretty cool that I know these things by heart (for real, pun intended).Maybe some of what Moses tried to tell the Israelites really did translate down from generation to generation. Maybe there's hope for us yet, because of course I do believe Habonim Dror has grown since it's inception. And that's pretty fucking incredible. Some would say, revolutionary.

Ok, last two things because it's Tu B'Av and this parasha is all about A-H-A-V-A-H! Like mostly when we're talking about the Sh'ma and the Ve'ahavtah...

#1 (In which I paraphrase and directly quote from my friend and coworker Rabbi Avi Orlow): Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel said: "Israel had no greater holidays than Tu B’Av and Yom Kippur, on which occasions the daughters of Israel used to go out in white garments, borrowed so as not to put to shame one who didn’t have a white garment." (Mishnah Ta’anit 4:8)

What does today and Yom Kippur have in common? In some ways these two days seem to be at odds. On Yom Kippur we work on our relationship with God. The day atones for our sins against God and does not speak to all of our sins to our fellow human beings (aka most of our sins). In contrast, we see that on Tu B’Av the unmarried girls of Jerusalem would dress in white garments and go out to dance in the vineyards attracting mates (yeah, I know).

Where Yom Kippur seems to be solely between human beings and God, Tu B’Av seems to be solely between human beings and each other.

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