Rosh Hashanah, Honey & Apples

To my Jewish friends and readers: L’Shana Tovah. Rough translation, for my non-Jewish friends and readers: "Happy New Year." The evening of Friday, September 11, 2026, marks the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. And just as many of us celebrate Lunar New Year (or, indeed, a January First New Year), I invite all of us to salute Rosh Hashanah, especially because it is marked by special foods.

The famous medieval Rabbi Menachem Meiri (1249-1310) explained that food should serve to focus our attention on the day’s agenda or that day’s significance in time. Hence, the custom of eating both apples and honey as food on Rosh Hashanah, not only for their nutritive value but especially because of their value as symbols.

Honey, into which observers of Rosh Hashanah dip apples, is an expression of hope that sweetness will mark our lives in the coming year. Also, while honey is kosher, the bee, from which it comes, is not. Thus, honey is a sign of sorts that while we may be unworthy or impure, the prayers from our lips might be accepted as pure. Sweet.

In its way, too, honey is a “September food,” a food not tasted earlier during the year. In the Northern Hemisphere, the Jewish New Year is also the finish line for the bees’ year of work. The honey that these buzzing bits of business have made is now available to those who celebrate important holidays with it.

Also, at Rosh Hashanah, the first piece of broken challah—another important Rosh Hashanah food—is allowed to be dipped or dabbed in honey, rather than salt (as at all other times of the year, for example on each Friday’s Shabbat), a symbol of the hope that sweetness, not bitterness or “tears” (salt), will enter our lives in the coming year.

In Jewish tradition, apples are honored for both their healing power as well as their sweetness. (Again, on Rosh Hashanah, a presage of sweetness and health as circumstances of a coming year). The Song of Songs (2:3) singles out the specialness of the apple tree among the other trees of the forest, as well as the sweetness of its fruit and its attractive aroma (7:8).

Additionally, it is the custom at Rosh Hashanah to serve a fruit not yet tasted during the past year. It may seem odd to us moderns, but the apple fills that bill perfectly, for in olden times it would have come to harvest at that time of the year and in that season, not before. (Year-round apple having is a very modern phenom.)

More on honey on this site. Did you know that bees are the only insect that makes a food—honey—eaten by humans? And they have been making it for 20 million years, 18 to 19 million years longer than we’ve been eating it?

More on The Apple also on this site. And many recipes here that use or contain apples. Did you know that apples are among the most diverse of living things? Somewhere near 8,000 varieties of apples now grow all over the globe. And science is closing in on the number of genes in the apple genome, around 50,000 against a mere 25,000 or so for the human.