Question:

Every year on the night of Rosh Hashana, I like to share with my family a new thought about why we dip apple in honey. I am starting to run out of novel interpretations. Even Rabbi Google didn't help. Can you tell me one I haven't heard before?

Answer:

Honey is a miraculous substance. It can do the impossible. Just try this experiment with your family at the Rosh Hashana table:

1. Dunk a slice of apple into a bowl of honey
2. Lift the apple out of the honey
3. Hold the apple over the bowl and allow a shaft of honey to drip back down into the bowl
4. While it is oozing downwards, quickly lift the apple until the shaft breaks
5. Watch carefully. The honey on the apple starts to fall a little, and then climbs back upwards towards the apple, defying the laws of gravity
6. Say "Wow!"

The upward climbing honey gives us a moving message for the new year. Even if you have fallen, you can always climb back up. Even if you have become disconnected, you can reconnect. You may have become estranged from your people and from your G-d. You may have lost your way in life and fallen to a very low place. But you can always pick yourself back up. No force in the world can stop a Jew coming home.

The honey may fall downwards, but at a certain point it turns around. In fact, it is the falling down that causes the bouncing up. The further you have strayed from Judaism, the more rebound energy you have built up for your return.

A Jewish soul wants to be Jewish. Materialistic distractions can only hold us back for so long. Our inner pull towards G-d is stronger than the pull of gravity towards the earth.  Honey always bounces back. So can we.

 

~ Rabbi Aron Moss

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