*How Is Love Doing? | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | August 8, 2025*
Tonight is the eve of Tu B’Av, the Jewish holiday of love, a day traditionally associated with matchmaking, joy, and renewal of relationships, and already at the beginning of the week I found myself wondering—really, how is love doing?
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We all know very well how sorrow is doing, how worry is doing, how pain and fear and even helplessness and hope are doing. But it’s been a long time since we asked how love is doing.
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So I asked my writing community on Zoom this week, tell me, how is love doing? And in the chat, they wrote all kinds of things like, “Love is pulsing somewhere,” or “Love has vanished,” or “We’re working on it.” I don’t think they’ve asked themselves that in a long time either.
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It’s not surprising. When you’re Jewish in today’s world - and Israeli on top of that - love is one of the last things you’ll come across while scrolling. Almost every Instagram post hits like a hammer. So do the news headlines. There are plenty of people around the world who love Israel, but they’re mostly silent these days. I can understand them. Speaking out feels risky. Even within Israel, the war has torn us so deeply that there are days it feels dangerous to speak, and days when it’s very hard to feel love.
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That’s why I was grateful for this excuse on the calendar to shift my thoughts away from their usual paths these past two years and invite my community of writers who write on zoom with me to think about love, to read about it, and then to write it. Some things are best not left waiting. Better to signal to life that you're interested. I think Jews and love are one of those things right now. We have to signal to it.
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So this week, I signaled to love that I’m interested in it. More than I am in all the other heavy emotions trying to seduce us from every corner. And memories immediately surfaced: how my mother let the bridal salon of early-70s Tel Aviv style her however they pleased, and found herself standing under the chuppah with a chain of paper rings on her head, the kind we use to decorate sukkahs. I remembered my grandparents, who got engaged on November 29, the night of the UN vote on the establishment of Israel, and missed the announcement on the radio, wondering why everyone was dancing in circles outside in their honor. I remembered my other grandparents, who were matched by the Jewish Agency on the Russian-Polish border just so my grandmother could get a travel document and cross the border during the war. The plan was to divorce after crossing - not fall in love and spend sixty more years together.
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And so this week, I thought not only of the fears I’m made of but of the loves I’m made of. Longtime bonds of affection, desperate infatuations, arranged matches, fights that reached the heavens, shared survival again and again, and even mythical love stories passed down through the family, involving matchmaking, poisoning, horse-drawn carriages, and a hunchbacked man.
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How refreshing to remember that we are not only the sum of our worries, our losses, our grief, but also the sum of all the love that has been poured into us.
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And then, at the end of this week of thinking about love, I remembered a short video I’ve saved for years of Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski, just two minutes long, filmed sixteen years ago, in which he says something about love that seems simple, but completely changed the way I thought.
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Rabbi Twerski says: “Love is a word that in our culture has almost lost its meaning. There's an interesting story about the rabbi of Kotsk, who came across a young man who was clearly enjoying a dish of fish he was eating. And he said, “young man, why are you eating that fish”? And the man said “because I love fish”. The rabbi said, “oh , you love the fish, that’s why you took it out of the water and killed it and boiled it. Don’t tell me you love the fish, you love yourself. And because the fish tastes good to you, therefore you took it out of the water and killed it and boiled it’”.
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And Rabbi Twerski continues: “So much of what is love is fish love. And so, a young couple falls in love, what does that mean? That means that he saw in that woman someone who he felt can provide all his physical and emotional needs. And she felt that this man is somebody she feels can provide those same things for her. That was love. But each one of them is looking out for their own needs. It’s not love for the other. The other person becomes a vehicle for my gratification.”
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“Too much of what is called love is fish love. And external love is not what I’m going to get but what I’m going to give. Rabbi Desler said that people make a serious mistake thinking that you give to those whom you love. And the real answer is that you love those to whom you give. And his point is, if I give something to you I’ve invested myself in you, and since self love is a given, everybody loves themselves, now that part of me has become in you, there’s part of me in you that I love. So true love is a love of giving, not a love of receiving”.
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The first time I heard that, as deep as it was, it brought me back to my childhood neighbor, Galila, who gave me all sorts of advice that stayed with me for life. One of them was that if I ever fall in love with someone, not to wait for him to fall in love with me so I could receive something, but rather, to get him to invest in me so that he’d fall in love in the end.
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Seems to me it’s based on the same exact idea.
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In any case, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks also said that the door to happiness opens outward. Meaning, happiness doesn’t come from receiving things, but from giving. And maybe the piece of the puzzle that brings it all together is love. When we give something of ourselves to someone, our heart opens to them, because now they hold a part of us inside them.
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So I wish us all the chance to give and to love, and then to give and love even more.
And may we all have a peaceful Shabbat,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*