I don’t remember most of what my family ate on Rosh Hashanah when I was growing up. We likely had a platter of brisket and maybe a steaming tureen of tzimmes. There was probably a bottle of Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider on the table to be festive — but honestly, the details are fuzzy. What I do remember, however, is the challah my mom would bring home from the supermarket bakery: a fat, doughy spiral, brimming with jammy raisins. I would pull hefty chunks from the middle (bad challah etiquette, I know), dipping them into pools of golden honey and marveling at the rare opportunity to eat dessert for dinner. More than chicken soup, more than apples and honey even, that challah was my indication that the New Year had arrived.
Like most Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah is filled with rich food symbolism. The round challah on my family’s dinner table, for example, represented the cyclical nature of life, while the raisins evoked our wishes for a sweet year ahead. And while my family always kept things simple with the traditional apples and honey, some families (particularly Sephardic and Mizrahi) hold elaborate food seders at Rosh Hashanah dinner. Throughout the meal they eat particular foods — like leeks, beets, squash, pomegranate seeds and fish heads — ascribing to them metaphorical significance and blessings for the coming year.
More recently I learned that when it comes to challah, the rounded shape I was accustomed to eating on Rosh Hashanah is just one of several ways to imbue added meaning. Traditionally, some Ashkenazim formed other edible symbols out of the dough — things like crowns, which represented God’s majesty; ladders (a shape also commonly eaten before the Yom Kippur fast) to represent Moses’ ascent on Mount Sinai and our collective spiritual ascent throughout the holiday season; and, my favorite, birds.
Read more:
http://www.forward.com/articles/142367/#ixzz1XVr22lEm
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