Tastes of Hope and Sorrow
An essay on remembering the days
Our family’s way of marking Rosh Hashanah is pretty simple. Every year, we cut up an apple or two. We get out some honey. We gather our kids to the table and tell them that it’s the Day of Judgement. Then we wish them a good and sweet new year.
It will be good, we assure them, because God is good and He can turn all things to our good if we let Him. But there’s a bit of a catch: not everything that’s good for us is pleasant. Some things are good for our eternal progression but a terrible pain in the now. So on Rosh Hashanah we also ask, God willing, for the coming year to be sweet. We’ll take our apple, yes, and be grateful—but tonight, let’s drizzle it in honey and hope.
I like this tradition, because it’s a lesson you can taste. Jewish holidays are good at that. They offer instruction to the senses, give us experiences to hold on to and wrestle with. Or play with! This year on Rosh Hashanah, after my son Elijah finished his first slice of honey-dipped apple, he walked to our cupboard and got out some salt. During Passover, we dip parsley in saltwater to evoke the tears of our ancestors while they were in bondage, so Elijah figured that a salted apple slice would be a good way to show God that, as far as the next year was concerned, he was tempering his expectations.
It’s not traditional to eat salt on your apples, but it hasn’t always been tradition to eat apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah in the first place. The internet informs me that the practice is first mentioned in a 14th century book by a rabbi born in the city of Cologne. An origin in Germany would make sense. After all, apples are more popular in cooler climates; in the Bible, people eat more grapes, figs, and dates. The way my family marks this Jewish holiday may go back generations, but it wasn’t handed down from Sinai. Someone or some family, at some point many, many centuries into Jewish history, had to make it up.
And more power to them! Religions ought to live a little, adding traditions here and there as they grow. I will admit that, living less than two centuries into Latter-day Saint history, our holidays can feel a little underwhelming to me. But I suspect they’re still in their early stages, waiting to see what we might make of them. Don’t get me wrong—I think it’s fine that we mostly borrowed older traditions for Christmas and Easter and the ward Halloween party. But I’m rooting for people who bring their imaginations to the emerging holidays we can claim as our own.
Take General Conference. It’s got the makings of a perfectly fascinating holiday. There’s a break from routine. There’s a preceding period of anticipation. There’s a spirit of gathering and an overtly shared experience you can talk about with friends later.
To mark the weekend, we borrowed somebody’s tradition of letting kids build blanket forts that face the television set, like the tents people pitched to listen to King Benjamin. It’s a nice, sensory tradition. Something that makes sense on its own and means more with the Book of Mormon overtones. We don’t have an accompanying menu in my family yet, but I know a lot of people who make conference-specific foods. Maybe someday people will come up with foods that teach. Apostle waffles, maybe, with twelve pieces of fruit set into the squares? Something sweet and sour, to prepare us for the words of comfort and of admonition that we’re likely to hear? And who knows—maybe the paper conference bingos of today will eventually become so ingrained that people make wooden General Conference boards with different symbols that can be used year to year. In the future, General Conference could have its own holiday object.
The Relief Society birthday is another holiday I’d love to see us continue to develop. It’s already a part of ward culture in most places, even if celebration is just a matter of cake or a sweet getting passed around. Why not try more? A could make a local tradition of visiting a nearby river, and telling the story of how Emma Smith said that members should be ready to rescue immigrants stuck in the rapids as the first example of the “extraordinary occasions and pressing calls” the Relief Society anticipated. Another ward might try out a visit to the temple grounds as a reminder of how Margaret Cook and Sarah Granger Kimball’s desire to help build the temple led to the Relief Society’s creation, and to remember how the Relief Society turned into a sort of Nauvoo school of the prophets, where women prepared themselves to receive the temple’s power.
I like the idea of Pioneer Day but have been inconsistent about any kind of observance. I haven’t been able to find the right thing for the eyes or tongue. One option, of course, is to take a long walk. I can imagine it as a hiking holiday, a time to reconnect with the power in one’s own legs. Or maybe this coming year, with Elijah in mind, I should get a bunch of foods that prominently feature salt. Pretzels and popcorn. Roasted peanuts. I can gather my kids around and tell them a simple story: the one about how some of the first pioneers to reach Utah went back along the trail to help others and brought with them bits of salt from the Great Salt Lake, so that the coming travelers could taste the promise from far away.
I want to taste the promise of an unseen land. That kind of longing, to me, is holy. And any tradition that helps me access a longing like that, one that is before us and beyond us, can transform an anniversary into a true holy day.
This piece was published in 2024 as part of the Holiday Lit Blitz by the Mormon Lit Lab. Sign up for our newsletter for future updates.