a little apple to my honey

mich writes about another rosh hashanah. another opportunity to welcome the new year w sweet treats and reminisce about all the things the past and future stir up.

Shana tova everyone! 

I thought I would write this one on Rosh Hashanah and invite you all to join me in welcoming the year ahead. Around this time last year, we launched our newsletter at Heima (the artist residency we did in Iceland) And like last year, we celebrated Rosh Hashanah late this year. Last year’s violent windstorms contributed to the delay as we were halted from leaving our house at risk of being literally blown away. This year, in a very predictable fashion, it’s because I forgot to book the day off work. Maybe this typical tardiness is testing my patience, because it knows I don’t have any. 

Looking back on the lessons from the last year, all that I’ve learned, all that has brought me here, writing this for me, for you, for us. A year has passed, and naturally a lot has changed: we moved to a beautiful house, we got married (lol), and we’re a week away from starting our Masters’ programme. A year has passed and I gleefully scroll through this substack seeing your names as a reminder to myself of how, after a year of writing, I’m really fucking grateful that you’re still here and if no where else, there’s a space for us to connect even if it’s only through this weird virtual vortex where we just share words with you.

We were hit with lockdown just under 6 months of settling into this country. This posed a barrier to meeting new people and ultimately, forming community. When summer of 2020 rolled in, my job at Tate was at risk and I took that as an opportunity to immerse myself in the strike against job cuts; my attempt at making friends while adjacently fighting for my job (which in the end, I tragically lost btw). The people I connected with were also the people who came to my first Jewish holiday dinner. Some of those relationships fizzled in time, but that first Rosh Hashanah acted as a catalyst for what the future ones could be. Possibilities for gathering together. In the past years, they’ve evolved, inviting new dishes, rituals and people to the table. They’ve become more meaningful and in some ways and unintentionally, spiritual too. I’m not religious, I don’t keep Yom Kippur, or go to shul or keep kosher. My lifestyle is incongruent with most of Jewish law. But these holidays awaken something, and I’m still trying to figure out what that something is. 

Never thought I would be that guy but I’ve been on this weird journey of learning more about Jewish mysticism and the magical properties of our ancestral recipes. (Dori Midnight has some cool guides on these topics including rituals you can do on the high holidays). In reading some of those guides, I started thinking more about symbols and I guess, understanding or attributing meaning to the foods we dress our table with and alongside this, figuring out how they relate to me. 

My dad is obsessed with apples. He used to cut the skins off of them, arrange them on a plate in an entangled curly mess and serve the juicy insides alongside the skin. And while separate but somehow linked together, we snacked on the carefully sliced apple meat. I never really liked apples, and even less their tannic, papery skins but with the combination of my dad’s insistence and his loving plating, I never had the heart to send them back. Among the many symphonies that encapsulate my parents’ home, my dads euphoric apple crunching is one that prevails. I swear he eats like 3 a day. When we’re on holiday, he compulsively stops at every single grocer to stock up on them. He pretends it’s for us, asking in sheer hopefulness if we want some, disguising his own childlike glee and fully ignoring the fact that no, aba, none of us want apples when we are actively seeking ice cream or beer. 

I can’t help but wonder what the obsession is. But maybe for him, this profound love affair emerges from some subconscious ancestral lineage. The apple holds a significant role in the Zohar; a symbol of holiness/divinity, love/birth and healing. For centuries, ashkenazis have dipped it in honey every year to welcome a sweet year ahead. Or maybe my dad just enjoys it for the very (mediocre imo) fruit that it is. 

And then there’s the honey: that golden sticky gooey juice that tastes like heaven and sticks to everything. My grandad used to have cupboards full of that crystallised nectar, dollops of liquid would form in hardened ditches, a textural divinity. Saba (grandad in Hebrew and what I called him) use to dip a spoon into the honey and carefully place little pieces of lemon, peels included (trust me) and then eat it like ice cream. Tart, sour and sweet: a culinary masterpiece.

My distance to home emanates on the high holidays. So I’ve taken them with me and use them as a portal to access pockets of nostalgia. I make my mother’s honey cake on Rosh Hashanah and my safta’s matzah ball soup on Passover and naturally, memories of home seep through. They never taste the same, (you can’t compete with Jewish moms) but I’m learning that aside from keeping my traditions alive, I bust out the holidays to make space for new traditions, rituals, and connections to coincide with my new house, new friends and I’ll say it; new life. In the moments where I think I miss home, where I long the most for my parents, for the dining table in their kitchen that poses as an altar of warm memories, for Bebe, my beautiful cat that’s been my sidekick for my entire adolescence, I let the holidays remind me that home is an arbitrary shapeshifting spirit. It’s also where I feel safe, like at my desk swallowed by a disordered sea of art and sewing supplies. It’s in the kitchen where I enter a zombied meditative state as I knead dough or chop veg. Its eating dinner with Julia and e v after a long work day and an even longer commute. It’s with Julia, always with Julia. 

At the table the other night I read a passage I wrote, as a way to welcome the evening and as I end this newsletter, I’d like to share it with you: 

On Rosh Hashanah we don’t simply invite everyone to have a good year, but more importantly a sweet year. Our table is doused with symbols oozing with sweetness. Dipping apples in honey has been a customary practice in Jewish tradition with its earliest scriptures dating back to the 13th century. In fact, we like to bathe our table (and ourselves?) in that  golden lip smacking goo. A cloak of sweetness, a magical protector. Honey is medicine; this immune boosting liquid makes for a natural lozenge when our throat gives up on us. It’s anti microbial properties allow it to act as a dermatological phenomenon, ever heard of manuka masks? Put honey on our windowsill for the monsters to devour in our place, infuse it with herbs, garlic, flowers. But however way you choose to interact with it, don’t forget to thank the bees, the flowers and the celestial beings that make it.  

So welcome and thankyou for holding space for me to flaunt my Jewishness and also, I hope that if tonight doesn’t move you toward something healing or reflective then at the very least i hope it provides you with a little bit of sweetness. 

Shana tova u metuka everyone <3