I described the longing I feel walking through Jerusalem in my last piece, being among the stones without ever quite arriving at the city itself. Six days after Tisha B’Av, the same calendar now asks the opposite question. Can a broken vessel be gathered, and if so, in what voice.

I want to start with a small detail, because it seems to summarize the whole matter for me. The number fifteen in Hebrew would normally be written as ten plus five, yud and hei. But yud hei is part of Hashem’s name, Yah. So tradition never writes fifteen that way, using tet and vav instead, nine and six, a combination that gives the same number without putting the Name on paper. The name of Tu B’Av itself, the word tu, carries the trace of that avoidance. The day of love and unity begins, in its very name, with a carefulness not to write the Name where it isn’t needed.

The final line of the Mishnah’s tractate Ta’anit says there were no days of joy in Israel greater than the fifteenth of Av and the Day of Atonement. On those days the daughters of Jerusalem would go out in borrowed white garments and dance in the vineyards. The Mishnah explains why the garments were borrowed itself, so as not to shame anyone who had none of her own. The Zohar names the fabric of these garments too, not wool, not linen, but silk. This detail isn’t incidental. The prohibition on mixing wool and linen, shatnez, traces back, according to the Vilna Gaon, to the enmity between Cain and Abel, one offering linen from the earth, the other wool from the flock, and that rivalry was the cause of the first fratricide. Silk is neither wool nor linen, outside both materials in which that enmity was coded. The daughters of Jerusalem wore this fabric specifically on that day, choosing the one material that carried no trace of the first jealousy.

Reading this detail as a cliched “day of love” story misses what’s actually there. What’s happening is that the rich wore the same white as the poor, so that whose garment was her own and whose was borrowed couldn’t be seen. The words said to the young men point the same way, look at family rather than beauty, meaning look........

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