What Dipping the Apple Can Teach Us

Ahead of Rosh HaShanah, I’ve been thinking about what I hope my children understand when we dip our apples in honey, and what I still need to remind myself. A personal reflection on the pain we carry and the sweetness we can add.

When I put my children to bed, I carry more into their room than I wish I did.

There is the pain of the world, the fear and anger that can follow us through a day. There is also the personal pain, the people I miss, the losses that remain part of my life even on an otherwise ordinary evening. I do not leave all of that behind simply because it is time for a story and a goodnight kiss. Nor do any of us.

And yet, looking at my children, I yearn for them to know that they can add something good to this world. Even this world. Especially the one they will actually inherit, with all its beauty and all its brokenness.

That is what I have been thinking about as Rosh HaShanah approaches, and why a familiar childhood explanation has begun to feel incomplete.

My children hear what I heard when I was their age: We eat apples dipped in honey as a symbol of a sweet new year. It is a lovely tradition, and asking children to eat something covered in honey is rarely the most difficult part of Jewish parenting.

But I keep coming back to the dipping.

We have to do something. We pick up the apple and reach for the honey. Between our hope for sweetness and our experience of it, there is an action.

So much of Judaism brings an idea into our hands. We light candles to welcome Shabbat. We eat matzah as we tell the story of leaving Egypt. Through the physical act, an idea becomes something we participate in. Perhaps dipping the apple can help us understand our part in the sweetness we wish one another.

This year, we will welcome Rosh HaShanah at sundown on September 11, the 25th anniversary of a day that changed a generation and our world. Less than a month later, we will mark three years since October 7.

The anniversaries ask us to remember. For so many, the pain has never receded enough to need a reminder. The losses of October 7 and the suffering of the war that followed are carried in families, in communities, and in the lives of people far beyond the places where the violence occurred. Political strife and hatred directed at Jews and Israel add to what many of us carry.

These histories are different. Both remind me how long the consequences of a single day can endure, and how little turning a calendar page does to bring them to an end.

We enter a new year with what we have lived through. The global pain and the personal come with us.

So what can it mean to wish for a sweet year?

I find myself choosing the word “add” carefully. I do not believe every terrible thing contains some hidden sweetness, waiting for us to be wise enough to discover it. Some things are simply devastating. Whatever good we do afterward will never justify what happened.

When someone we love dies, we would give back every lesson learned from grief to have them at the table again.

Still, we have this love, and we have to decide how to live with it. We can tell our children a story about the person they will never have enough time to know. We can continue an act of generosity that mattered to them. We can bring a meal to someone whose own loss is newer, remembering how difficult it was to answer the simple question of whether we needed anything.

The empty chair remains empty. Someone else has been fed. Both are true.

That, to me, is the challenge in the honey. We cannot make everything good. We are still responsible for the good we can do.

Some days our capacity will be small. Some days we will need someone else to reach toward us. A community gives us somewhere to bring that need, and a chance to answer it when we have the strength.

This matters in our response to hatred, too. Defending Jewish life requires courage and vigilance. It also requires us to keep making a Jewish life worth passing on. Our children need experiences of belonging and joy, opportunities to care for others, and adults who show them how to stand up for themselves without surrendering their concern for anyone else.

My children know that much of my work involves caring for our Jewish community and building relationships with people beyond it. What I hope they understand, as they grow, is that this work can be difficult for the same reasons it matters. Hurt can make us withdraw. Anger can make it harder to listen. I struggle with that, too. When I ask my children to add sweetness to the world, I am asking something of myself.

That work asks something of me, especially when I am hurt or angry. Relationships need attention through disagreement and patience when trust comes slowly. I do not always find that easy. My children will learn what I believe about adding sweetness partly by watching whether I keep making that effort.

At bedtime, I cannot promise them a world without cruelty or loss. I wish I could. I can help them understand that their actions matter within it. They can notice the child sitting alone. They can stand beside someone being mistreated. They can offer kindness before they know whether it will be returned.

And I can try to remember that the same is true for me.

This Rosh HaShanah, as we dip our apples, I want to tell my children that we are wishing for a sweet year and accepting a part in making it sweeter.

We will carry pain into the new year. We can carry honey, too. And wherever we can, we have to reach out and add it.