On Tu B’Av, the ‘Jewish Valentine’s Day,’ Jewish astrologers and intuitives have the key to love
By Merissa Nathan Gerson
on Tablet Magazine
Tu B’Av, the 15th of the Jewish month of Av, celebrated this year beginning on the night of July 26, has always been a bit of a mystery. A vineyard festival often called the Jewish Valentine’s Day, it foreshadows the High Holidays as a day of repentance-free joy. In the Talmud, Shimon ben Gamliel said it was the day when “the maidens of Israel would go out and dance in the vineyards. The men would go there, and the maidens would say: ‘Young man, lift up your eyes and see what you will select.’” This ancient Jewish love holiday, a time to procure new love, with its mystical undertones, poses a question: What is love, and how do we go about finding it?
Just as the ancestors danced in white under the stars, today some Jewish innovators look to other creative, nature-based practices. Jewish astrologers and intuitive healers Jessica Lanyadoo, Dori Midnight, and Chani Nicholas lean on astrology and plant medicine to inform their practices, and have the potion for finding true love. But it may not be what you expected.
“This idea that we have about love, that love is something that we get, like pants, is not true,” said the Canadian-born Lanyadoo, a “medical intuitive” and “medical astrologer” who has been… [read more]
