Why Apples and Honey on Rosh HaShanah?

Interpretation (Sources below)

Why do we dip apples in honey on Rosh HaShanah? First we must answer: Why the apple? "Beneath an apple tree I aroused You." (Song of Songs 8:5) This song of two lovers yearning, encountering, and discovering each other is read by the sages as an allegory of Israel's love with the Eternal. The apple trees symbolizes this encounter. Israel sees the Eternal as a single apple tree standing out in a forest (Rashi on Song 2:3). It stood out from other trees: instead of deep shadow, there was light flickering through the wind-stroked branches; and instead of infertile comfort, it was fruitful.

The apple tree stands as a symbol for both lovers in this encounter. Yes, Israel saw the Eternal as clearly as a hungry sojourner who spots and delights in the sight of an apple tree among cedars. But Israel, too, is symbolized by that same tree (Shabbat 88a) and it was amidst the aroma of ripe apples that G-d was first seduced into leading Israel's destiny (Rashi on Song 8:5:3). Honey and milk was under Israel's tongue and the perfume of Lebanon clung to its clothes, and the Eternal told Israel, "your breath [is] like the fragrance of apples" (Song 4:11, 7:9).

The encounter was mutual and the apple tree was its nexus. When we look beyond this genesis, we find a millennial relationship, with ups and downs, periods of closeness and distance. On Pesach, the apple reminds us of a painful episode in this relationship. In a period where intimacy was lacking, the children of Israel no longer dwelled in the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They were closer to the bricks to which they were enslaved than their relationship to the Eternal. On Pesach, we eat the haroset, made of apples, because its color reminds us of the mortar we applied in tired toil (Pesachim 116a). Yet, this might seem paradoxical: Why embed a symbol of such delight--the apple--in what is meant to remind us enslavement? Apples are mixed into the haroset as a reminder that, even in enslavement, we could remember our first love and its promise of a new year. Indeed, even now, when we are tired and thirsty, the apple tingles the tongue and flares the nose with more power than when it is savored in a peaceful garden. A battered people might grow distant from the Eternal, but when memories do rise up, eyes tear up and the heart throbs. Hope for a new year was never effaced.

An apple's aroma clings to us throughout this journey. After the Eternal took us out of Egypt, the relationship between Israel and the Eternal was put in word, with a Name, with the gift of a marriage contract (ketubah) at Mount Sinai. This is the moment when the covenant was first finalized in writing. At this moment, Rashi explains that Mount Sinai was hanging above Israel like the promise of an apple on a tree, ripe for the picking (Rashi on Song 8:5:3).

The apple is thus connected to three key moments in our relationship to the Eternal: first love; separation in Egypt; and renewal at Mount Sinai. As an apple plucked, seeds planted, and a new tree, we ascend, descend, and then ascent to firmer foundations. The pattern of our divine love manifests itself not just in the journey of an apple, but also across and within human love, pregnancy, and parental love. As Rav Avira teaches, women would go to a field and give birth under an apple tree (Sotah 11b). After one of love's fruits was plucked, the women laid down close to the earth as their body struggled to give birth to something new.

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As a new year approaches and creation is sustained for yet another cycle, we must thus, like women giving birth, go under an apple tree, pick an apple, and taste its sweetness so that we may remind both ourselves and the Name of that first love and the long journey it endured. The apple reminds us that for every time when we were parched for meaning, the shade and sweetness of an apple tree rekindled our precious tie to love Eternal.

After all, love renewed is more than problems solved; repentence and forgiveness may clear away what damaged the relationship, but teshuva requires a rekindling of that first love so that it is renewed not just down to its contractual foundation and cyclical inevitability, but right down to its ecstatic foundation. Salvation saves us from the negative, but light makes us see the positive--hence the need for salvation and light, Yom Kippur and Rosh HaShanah (cf. Psalm 27:1).

The smell of an apple symbolizes a student's exertion to attain its teacher (Likutei Moharan, Part II 5:15:8). In love, we must always be like students striving to attain and connect with the deepest intimacy of the other. Some might object that this only goes one way, for we are the student and the Eternal is our teacher. But the teacher, too, learns from his students (Taanit 7a:12; Numbers 14:11-20). Is this why we were made, so the the Eternal may expand beyond itself and, in that same moment as we learn about the Eternal, the Eternal, too, learns something new?

When we recollect this relationship of love and learning, clearing away the guilt, letting go of blame, and moving forward to a new year, the relationship is renewed with a promise. It is the promise of an open, unpredictable future as the covenant between Israel and the Eternal continues to unfold. The winter is forgotten as easily as the stretch with which we plucked the apple, whose smell opens us to the taste of what's to come: love and learning.

By slicing this apple and sharing it with the children of Israel, love is multiplied and shared like the fruits of that first bond. By dipping apples in honey, we promise that we will always find ways to make what is sweet even sweeter.

How does this manifest?

The apple is a symbol of love, while the honey is a symbol of learning. When the relationship enters its inevitable winter, when the taste of apples starts to dull, we apply learning to rekindle our love by dipping our apples in honey. In this way, difficult seasons become just as sweet as seasons of harvest.

When we refer to the Eternal as the Name, we emphasize that our learning is grounded in the text. Alongside all the nations, we learn from nature, but the torah is our heritage. It is a pure text, whose context is built entirely from its use as an interface for a dialogue with the Eternal. This is the text into which we weave ourselves, binding siblings to each other, and generations to one another. This is the text through which we learn to learn, so that we may love to learn and learn to love. As the new year opens a new cycle of reading, we are prepared to delight as we interpret each line of Torah. Honey is to a slice of apple as a learned interpretation is to a line of Torah. We thus dip a slice, interpret a line, interpret why we dip, and dip so that we may interpret.

To emphasize the connection between nature and text, which in turns explains the glory of learning, we must now answer: Why dip the apple in honey instead of other sweet things, like date syrup or pomegranates? The apple, like other fruit, conjures that sweetness fed by earth and light. It is the first sweetness of creation. Honey, however, emerged when bees, like Israel, started to do what the wind eternal once did alone. By gathering pollen from wind-pollinated flowers, not only did the bee introduce a unique sweetness to this world, a sweetness that mingles the aromas of various flowers--like voices spread across the land mingled into a common song--but the bee also eased and added to the works of the wind. The bee goes from flower to flower, on cliffs and crevices, ensuring that no flower is left behind. The wind gives without taking anything for itself. Yes, the bee takes something to sustain its labor, but it also gives back by helping flowers meet, and feeding all those who delight in honey.

The bee's loving labor is a sign of how humans can use the given year to add to the Eternal's creation. The land flowing with milk and honey thus depends not just on the work of the Eternal, but also on the work completed by the Eternal's creation, including bees, cows, and humans--creatures honored insofar as they take so that they may give.

Under that apple tree, what could Israel possibly offer? A relationship. As a sign of this, the sages have interpreted the apple tree as Israel (Shabbat 88a), but also as Hashem (Rashi on Songs 2:3:1-2). The apple tree can symbolize each of the lovers because it symbolizes the reciprocity of their relationship. In that same spring moment when, "Beneath an apple tree I aroused You", a bee went into the flower, and from this first flower the first apple first ripened at the end of Elul, before the first Rosh HaShanah. Despite all its trials, the marriage still endures.

This notion of reciprocity is embedded in the Shema. Israel ends Hashem's solitude by speaking of the One as 'our G-d'. Although Hashem, the Eternal, was, is, and will be (Exodus 3:13), meaning only appears when static being first discovers dynamic relationship, and this is true as much for beings as it is for the Being. As a hanging symbol of the covenant engraved, the promise of an apple (תפח) is a truth (ת) that, once savored (פ), gives Life (ח) by turning life into meaning so that the Being delights its beings. An apple (תפח) is sliced and shared, we each dip it into honey, and, in silent delight, we hear, we rejoice, we renew the relationship, and a new year opens (פתח).

(At that same moment, somewhere, a bear (דב) dips its teeth (ש) in honey (דבש).)