Why We Dip the Apple in Honey (Rosh Hashanah 2026 / 5787)
Apple, honey, the bracha, the same order every year. It feels ancient. Parts of it are — but the apple is a late arrival, and the sources that put it there are easy to follow.
Sweetness comes first
Start with Nechemiah. The Torah is read publicly on the first day of the seventh month, the people hear it and begin to weep, and Nechemiah, Ezra and the Levites tell them to stop.1 Then comes the instruction: go eat rich foods, drink sweet drinks, send portions to whoever has nothing prepared, because the day is holy.2
No apple there. No honey either. Just the idea that this particular day gets marked with sweetness instead of mourning, which is a strange thing to say about a day of judgment and is probably why it stuck. Centuries later the Tur reaches back to exactly this line to explain why we don't fast on Rosh Hashanah.3
The Talmud's list
The Gemara gets specific. Abaye teaches that a person should make a habit of these at the start of the year: gourd, fenugreek, leeks, beets, and dates. Each grows fast, and each carries a wordplay that turns into a small request. This is where the whole practice of simanim comes from.4
Read the list again and notice what isn't on it.
No apple. The food half the Jewish world now treats as the symbol of Rosh Hashanah does not appear in the source text for symbolic Rosh Hashanah foods.
There's also a small difference between the two places the teaching appears. In Horayot, Abaye says a person should be accustomed to seeing these foods. In Keritot, he says eating them.5 A seder of simanim and a plate you look at are two different tables, and both are in the Gemara.
How the apple got there
The apple shows up in the Tur, and it shows up explicitly as a regional custom. In Ashkenaz, the Tur writes, they eat sweet apple with honey at the beginning of the meal and say: let this new year be renewed sweet for us.6
What makes that passage worth reading in full is what sits next to it. In Provence they brought all kinds of new fruits to the table and ate a sheep's head and lung, so as to be at the head and not the tail. The Maharam of Rothenburg ate a ram's head, for the ram of Yitzchak.6 The Tur isn't describing one custom. It's describing a map.
By the time the Rema records the apple in the Shulchan Aruch, it's settled: some have the custom of eating a sweet apple in honey, saying תתחדש עלינו שנה מתוקה, and, he adds, this is what we do.7 That line is where "a sweet new year" comes from.
Worth noticing what the sources don't say. Neither the Tur nor the Rema gives a symbolic reason for the apple. No mystical explanation, no derash. Apples are ripe in Tishrei across northern Europe, they're sweet without being cloying, and they hold up on a table for a few hours. Custom tends to find the fruit already in the house.
The one about the field of holy apples
You'll often see the custom traced to the Zohar's "field of holy apples," חקל תפוחין קדישין.
The phrase is real and it appears throughout the Zohar.8 But it isn't about Rosh Hashanah and it isn't about eating an apple. It's a name for the Shechinah, and in later kabbalistic practice it became the name of the Friday night Shabbat meal.9 The connection to the apple on your table is a retrofit, applied to a custom the Tur had already explained without any of it.
We like the plainer version better anyway.
The honey and the dates are closer than they look
Here's where it loops back to Abaye.
When the Torah lists the seven species and names the land one of olive oil and honey, the Gemara reads that honey as dates, the fruit from which date honey is pressed.10 Dates were the sweetener you'd actually have had.
Which means the last item on Abaye's list and the honey in the dish in front of you may be the same sweetness, arriving by two routes about two thousand years apart. The bees came later. The wish didn't change.
One table, several customs
If you grew up Ashkenazi, the night probably centers on the apple.
If you grew up Sephardi or Mizrahi, there's a fuller seder of simanim with a yehi ratzon over each one. That's not a departure from the codes, it's what's printed in the body of the Shulchan Aruch, with the wordplay for each food spelled out.7 The apple arrives as the Rema's gloss on top of it.
Neither corrects the other. If you're hosting people from both, put out the full spread and let everyone find what they came for.
Setting it out
The honey is the messiest thing on the table and the one that gets passed the most. Give it something to sit in.
Our Golden Hive Honey Dish is a golden hive with שנה מתוקה כדבש set into a band around it, a honeycomb dipper to match, and a glass dish inside to hold the honey. Set it out before the meal and leave it there through the chag.
Shop the Golden Hive Honey Dish →
See everything for Rosh Hashanah →
From our home to yours, a good and sweet year.
Sources
- Nechemiah 8:2 dates the assembly to the first day of the seventh month; 8:9 records the weeping and the instruction not to mourn. Nechemiah 8:2, 8:9 ↩
- "Go, eat choice foods and drink sweet drinks and send portions to whoever has nothing prepared, for the day is holy." Nechemiah 8:10 ↩
- The Tur, arguing against fasting on Rosh Hashanah, cites what "the early leaders of Israel" said: go eat delicacies and drink sweet things. Tur, Orach Chaim 597. Compare Shulchan Aruch OC 597:1, which rules that one eats, drinks and rejoices, and does not fast. ↩
- Abaye's list: קרא (gourd), רוביא (fenugreek), כרתי (leeks), סילקא (beets/chard), תמרי (dates). Horayot 12a and Keritot 6a ↩
- Horayot has למיחזי, to see. Keritot has למיכל, to eat. Same teaching, same tanna, different verb. The Tur, quoting the passage, also includes אתרוגא, etrog, which our printed text of Keritot does not. Tur, Orach Chaim 583 ↩
- "As in Ashkenaz, where they are accustomed to eating sweet apple with honey at the beginning of the meal, to say: let this new year be renewed sweet for us." The same passage records the Provençal custom of the sheep's head and lung, and the Maharam of Rothenburg's ram's head. Tur, Orach Chaim 583 ↩ ↩2
- The body of the Shulchan Aruch lists the simanim with a yehi ratzon for each. The Rema's gloss adds: "Some have the custom of eating a sweet apple in honey (Tur) and saying: may a sweet year be renewed upon us (Abudarham). And this is what we do." Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 583:1 ↩ ↩2
- For example Zohar, Vayetzei 14:98, Zohar, Toldot 19:151, and Zohar, Beshalach 28:372, where the phrase names a recipient of divine blessing, not a food. ↩
- Pri Etz Chaim, Gate of the Sabbath 14:7, on the Friday night meal as סעודתא דחקל תפוחין קדישין. Pri Etz Chaim, Gate of the Sabbath 14:7 ↩
- On Devarim 8:8, the Gemara reads "honey" as dates, from which date honey is extracted, and Rav Hamnuna ranks the date ahead of the pomegranate for blessings on that basis. Berachot 41b ↩