| Case | Ruling | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| May one cut hair or launder in the week within which Tisha B'Av falls? | Forbidden — except Thursday | Honor of Shabbos |
| What may one eat at the eve-of-Tisha-B'Av meal? | Tanna Kamma: Not two cooked dishes, no meat, no wine | — |
| Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel: One need only make a change | — | |
| Must one overturn the bed? | Rabbi Yehuda: Yes — he requires it | — |
| Chachamim: They did not agree | — |
The orienting point: the avelus this mishnah knows begins only with the week Tisha B'Av falls in, and its eve — not from the seventeenth of Tammuz. The familiar layers — the Three Weeks, the Nine Days, music and haircuts forgone from the fast of Tammuz — are a later structure built on top. The distance between this mishnah and the calendar we actually keep is wide, and worth feeling.
Melechet Shlomo brings Rav's paired teaching: k'shem shemishenichnas Av mema'atin b'simcha, kach mishenichnas Adar marbin b'simcha — as joy is dialed down when Av enters, it is dialed up when Adar enters. Note the verb: in Av joy does not vanish, it only softens — rightly so. And it keeps the power to break through: on the fifteenth of Av, that same month, it bursts back into one of the most joyous days of the year.
Bartenura narrows it: the bar is not simply two cooked items. A food normally eaten raw — cheese, moist legumes — does not count as a tavshil even when cooked, so the restriction is sharper than the plain words sound. Tosafos Yom Tov adds that even laundering to set aside for later is forbidden, since it reads as turning the mind from the mourning.
The mishnah gives the bones — one cooked dish, no meat, no wine. Custom later fleshed out the mourner's meal: eaten low or on the ground, a hard-boiled egg, bread dipped in ash — a fully staged se'udas aveil over the Mikdash.
This is the working heart of the observance-laws run. The series treats Tisha B'Av not as a single day but as a deepening approach; here the restrictions of the week and the eve give that approach its concrete shape, just before the day itself.