The Holiday Nobody Talks About

Reader,

Tuesday night is a full moon. If you’re outside this week, look up. You’re looking at the same moon that’s marked a quiet Jewish holiday for thousands of years, one built around a single idea: LOVE.

It’s called Tu b’Av, and it’s one of the least taught festivals in the Jewish calendar with no special meal, no liturgy, barely a ritual to its name. Its old name is Chag HaAhava - "The day of love".

I love that it’s quiet.

Tradition didn’t build elaborate machinery around it, the way it did for the big holidays. The one custom that was created: on this day, women would go out and dance in the vineyards, dressed in borrowed white so wealth couldn’t set anyone apart, and look for their future lover in the open field.

Love, in this teaching, doesn’t need a system. It needs a clearing, and people willing to show up in it without pretense.

Most of us do the opposite.

We build machinery. Date night has an agenda. Conversations have a strategy. Even rest gets optimized. And underneath the machinery, there’s often something quieter happening: two people wanting to be loved for how they appear, while keeping what’s actually inside out of view. It feels safer. Surface can be managed. Surface can be controlled.

A practice for this week

Pick one evening. No agenda, no fix-it conversation, no date-night formula. Just sit across from your partner, or if you’re single, sit with yourself, and ask one question:

Where have I been offering my surface instead of my depth?

Don’t answer it out loud right away.

Let it sit for a minute first.

Notice what your body does with the question before your mind tries to resolve it.

If you’re with a partner, when you do speak, try naming one specific moment rather than a general pattern, something like “Tuesday, when you asked how my day was and I gave you the short version instead of the real one.”

Specific is where the honesty lives. General is where we hide.

That’s the whole practice. No exercise, no homework, no rating scale. Just one honest sentence, said out loud or held quietly, about where depth got protected by surface.

Wishing you a day of love,

Ted

November 12-15, my wife Leslie Riter and I are leading four days, three nights at a retreat center in the Santa Cruz Mountains, living in community. This weekend is for couples ready to treat connection as an ongoing practice of depth-to-depth rather than a problem to solve with new surface strategies. Reply to this newsletter for more details.

In September, my colleague Leslie Grace and I are opening Sacred Journey Into Intimacy again, our one-day couples retreat with a preparatory call and integration call. We have two spots remaining. Reply to this newsletter for more details.

If you’re ready to do this work one-on-one, click the photo to access my calendar for an exploratory call.