Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove: Apples and Honey on Rosh Hashanah - September 6, 2021

[Music] may it be your will our god and god of our ancestors that you renew for us a good and sweet year wherever you may be here in person or online i greet you with words of blessing may it be a year of sweetness for you your loved ones the jewish people and all of humanity we say these words to each other when we see each other in synagogue at a rosh hashanah tables as we bite down into our apples and our honey which next to matzah on passover is probably the most well-known culinary jewish holiday tradition some of you may be granny smith some of you may be jonah gold some of you may be red delicious but please god soon all of us are gonna be celebrating rosh hashanah by way of dipping apples in so this evening i want to teach you something something that i hope you can talk about or think about at your holiday tables a question which i hope will not only frame your dinner tonight but the holiday season that's upon us a simple question that will prove to be not so simple which is why do we eat apples and honey on rosh hashanah now right now i know it's good to be back here right now i know what you're thinking you're thinking rabbi that one is an easy one i went to hebrew school maybe i even got kicked out of hebrew school i can sing the song dip the apple in the honey make a bra loud and clear chana tovah have a happy sweet new year thank you david you're saying i got this one rabbi let the cantor sing something and let me go home for dinner which is why you need to know that like most things in life the real apple and honey story is actually a little more complicated than they taught you in hebrew school you see unlike the shofar the pomegranate and my mother's chicken soup all of the semanim the symbols of rosh hashanah that are mentioned in the talmud apples are nowhere on the list in fact the first mention of this custom is only stated in the 13th century by the ashkenazi rabbinic authority yaakov ben asher who is often referred to as a bala touring he codified that one should dip an apple and honey at the new year but and this is a big butt what you also need to know is that the sweetness that we associate with the domesticated apple the malice domestica was not an attribute of its ancient ancestor the malice versi as michael pollan explains in his book the botany of desire our modern day apples and its associations with sweetness and wholesomeness were not at all a given in pre-modern times consider what henry david thoreau said about the taste of wild apples as recently as the 19th century he wrote sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth on edge and make a j scream so pleasing to the eye and sweet to the smell as a wild apple may have been its contents were all together unpalatable its seeds actually contained a small quantity of cyanide forget about the johnny appleseed stories he once learned apple consumption was less about apple pie and more about the human inclination for apple cider in other words either the reason we eat apples and honey on rosh hashanah is different than we might think or that in the customs earliest stages the sweetness of the honey like the haroset on the bitter herb was intended to counteract the smack of the apples sour flavor so if apples and honey are not what you think they are about then what are they about so this evening i want to give you three possible explanations some anchored in tradition and some spoken out loud for the first time here this evening all starting points for you to set in motion your discussion tonight explanation number one sin you don't need to be an anthropologist of religion to wonder if there is not some ritualized ritual of atonement taking place as we pass bits of apple one to the other during the season of repentance the fly in the ointment if you will is that nowhere in the torah is the fruit of the garden of eden associated with an apple the talmud offers all sorts of possible trees for the tree of knowledge wheat fig grape even an etrog tree but apples never scholars believe that the unnamed biblical fruit only became an apple in the fourth century when the bible was translated into latin by jerome noting that the eudenic fruit was one that distinguished between good and evil and latin malam jerome intentionally or unintentionally substituted the latin noun for apple malam a translation that became standardized in art in milton's paradise lost and springsteen's pink cadillac all of which is a long and winded way of saying that as sure as i am that the origin of eating apples on rosh hashanah has nothing to do with the garden of eden it is simply not credible to believe that for the last thousand years jews have been biting down on apples oblivious to the fact that all of christendom associates apples with sin it's a thesis mind you made even more compelling now that i know and now you know that the ancient apple pleasing as it may have been to the eye was altogether bitter to taste so let me ask you in the year gone by did you give into temptation and bite down into the apple have you fallen short of the standards you set for yourself for your loved ones and before god it was the 11th century commentator rashi who noted that when jacob deceived his brother by stealing the birthright from his brother esau he concealed his identity by way of the scent of apples how have we deceived others and ourselves in the year gone by as for honey maybe the honey is meant to signal the nature of sin the momentary high covering up sin's bitter and lasting consequence or perhaps the honey is meant to signal that whatever our misdeeds these holidays they're here as spiritual comfort food a reminder that chuva repentance is within all our reach judaism i should point out is not christianity jews don't believe that humanity is hardwired one way or another we bristle at the notion that a person can be cancelled for a single misdeed without the possibility of redemption honey is actually of deep theological significance in the rabbinic tradition why because despite the fact that honey comes from the non-kosher bee honey is obviously kosher maybe just maybe the honey is meant to remind us that most people don't fit neatly in to categories of kosher and non-kosher and that if we want to receive forgiveness from others for our sins then a good starting point might be to provide others with that same generosity of spirit now there's a sticky topic for tonight's dinner table how can we hold people accountable ourselves included yet not reduce any soul to one misdeed explanation number two jewish identity if there is a time to take stock in your spiritual geography and perform an annual checkup as to how you are connected to your judaism and the jewish people then now is the time there are a number of species associated with israel but as most of us know israel is most famously described as a land flowing with milk and honey it was actually on rosh hashanah in the second temple period of ezra and nehemiah as the jewish people were returning to jerusalem they were instructed to drink sweet drinks interpreted by the rabbis to refer to among other things as honey so if eating of the fruit is meant to represent physical or spiritual exile then it's the sweetness of the honey that signals a return to our land to our people and to our tradition our ancestors understood this well when they instructed us to place a drop of honey on each letter as children first learn their aleph bet a pedagogical innovation meant to induce a pavlovian love for jewish learning jewish identity and jewish peoplehood so go around your table this evening ask each other and more importantly ask yourself how are you in exile from your jewish identity and how can this year be the year of return to our land to our people and to our tradition how can this be the year that you live your jewish life intentionally one sweet drop at a time it was thoreau who suggested that the westward journey of apples across the atlantic with a changed identity as they enter the new world is a parable for american identity this rosh hashanah let the apples and honey serve as a parable for your jewish identity a journey of return to rediscover the life-giving roots meant to sustain your spirit explanation number three and perhaps most importantly hope now stick with me with me on this one this interpretation is a higher difficulty level than the first two one of the first or the few mentions of apples in the bible comes from the love poetry of the song of songs it writes beneath the apple i awakened you there your mother gave birth to you it's an obscure references but the rabbis the rabbis have a field day with it according to the midrash when israel was enslaved in egypt and all hope was lost it was the women who insisted hope against hope that no matter pharaoh's harsh decrees no matter their husband's despair and exhaustion that tomorrow could be better than today the g-rated version of this story and this is a family service after all is that the women leveraged their feminine wiles to convince their enslaved husbands to bring new life into this world new life that arrived out of sight hidden from pharaoh thus the verse beneath the apple your mother gave birth to you in the apple orchards by this telling apples become a symbol of human resilience of as yet unrealized futures and of hope and given the year we've had given what's going on in the world in real time given the unknowns ahead i simply cannot think of a conversation to have at your rosh hashanah tables more important than hope go around your table ask each other where is resilience to be found where hope is hidden and what role you can play in the narrative of despair and turning it into one of realizing unseen futures men let the women take the lead on this one they gave us hope in egypt they can give us hope today sin jewish identity and hope three plausible or at least possible explanations for apples and honey by no means are they the only one one friend suggested this year that the ritual should trigger a discussion on the future of our great city the big apple another suggested that eating of the fruit of the earth as a prompt to discuss our relationship with mother earth one person suggested for obvious reasons that apple-based rituals should trigger family discussions about technology its uses and abuses my favorite explanation shared with me by a dear congregant is that the holidays are a time to ask the probing question of just how far the apple falls from the tree as children the degree to which we are extensions of and reactions to those who gave us life and as parents the degree to which we are extending our own children the ability to formulate their identities there is many explanations as there are apples waiting for you out of the synagogue take one home tonight pick one up from outside of services tomorrow at one o'clock when we blow the shofar share one with a friend most of all email me your interpretation let's all be interpreters of tradition giving new life to this festival and making the tradition our own unless you think me to be a curmudgeon or god forbid disrespectful of all of our hebrew school teachers past present and future i readily grant that the simplest explanation may be the best one of all a sweet treat for a sweet new year isn't that all that we really want may this year be a year of goodness of health of peace and most of all of sweetness for you for your loved ones for the jewish people and for all of humanity you

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Id: STpHmp0UndE

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021