The minor holiday of Tu b’Av (the fifteenth day of the month of Av) is primarily described in rabbinic sources as a day of consolation, marking the reconciliation between Israel and God after the destruction of the first Temple, commemorated six days earlier on Tisha b’Av. The Talmud also mentions a ritual in which unmarried women would sing and dance to attract potential husbands. The Talmud explains this ritual with reference to another national tragedy, described at the end of the book of Judges: the bloody civil war between Benjamin and the other Israelite tribes, provoked by a woman’s brutal gang rape by Benjaminite thugs. Shraga Bar-On explains:

This is . . . a great example of the manner in which the talmudic sages tried to shape historical consciousness via creative reinterpretation. One might have imagined that upon the conclusion of the civil war with the tribe of Benjamin, Jewish leaders would have established another Tisha b’Av to mourn this terrible civil war. . . . Instead, they took Tu b’Av and established it as a festival of love in which the tribes join together in matrimony. In this way, they turned enemies into lovers. The rabbis described Tu b’Av as an erotic holiday in which the daughters and sons of Israel go out to the vineyards and have a dance party—and then go home, as one people, as a mixed mosaic of tribes, to marry one another.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.