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Dip the Apple

By Esther Sender | September 28, 2011
Why are we supposed to dip an apple which is already sweet into something even sweeter?
And why is the sweetest substance in the world produced by a nonkosher stinging insect the bee?

I ask a few people.

“Because we are a sweet people but Hashem wants us to be even sweeter”is Faigy’s reply.

 

“I have to think about it” says Sima let’s call her.

After Shabbos Sima calls back. “I got it” she says. “I saw exactly what dipping the apple in the honey is all about.”

Sima’s son came home for Shabbos she explains — “not a usual event as he’s been busy a good few years trying to take a taste of the ‘other side.’

But life got tough out there in the big bad world and Erev Shabbos he kind of landed on her doorstep.

“It wasn’t one of those sob scenes where boy comes home after three years” she clarifies. “He comes home regularly. What was unusual was that this time he came home ‘to keep Shabbos.’

“It was easy for him to get into the swing of Shabbos. The food served with honor. The glow of Shabbos candles. It was as if his whole body could finally relax and let go of the tension he’d been holding onto for the last years.

“I gave him extra fish extra chicken extra everything” Sima says. “He listened to divrei Torah with thirst.”

Then something happened.

He started to get very nervous and fidgety.

“Ima” he said taking Sima aside. “I can’t do it.”

“Do what?” she asked her heart dropping inside from its newfound heights to its old depths.

“I can’t not smoke” he told her. “I want to keep Shabbos but I don’t know if I can not smoke.”

“I didn’t know how to answer that look of torn desperation in his eyes” she tells me.

“Does it mean” he asked her in all innocence “that if I can’t not smoke I have to throw all of Shabbos away? That I have to drive in a car and watch movies?”

“For sure not this much I know” Sima told him.

“I don’t know if I said the right thing” she now tells me “but I told him ‘Look we can do what we can but just the way in which you want so badly not to throw Shabbos away is the sweetest nachas I’ve ever tasted.’

“And at that moment” she says “I knew why we dip the apple in the honey and why honey the sweetest food comes from a nonkosher insect that stings.”

I phone a chacham in Tzfas and ask the two questions about dipping the apple and the bee.

He answers first about dipping the apple as it says a chacham answers the first question first.

“Sometimes we don’t recognize the sweetness in our life. All of our challenges are all blessings. We always have to be on the upswing we have to keep going upwards sweet we make sweeter.”

As far as the bee is concerned: “Honey is not produced by the bee but passes through it. Our challenges in life are there to pass through us to bring out our sweetness.”

I share the story of the boy who came to his mother about the smoking.

The chacham from Tzfas says “The fact that a person is bothered by not living up to or not conquering his yetzer hara is not terrible it doesn’t make him treif; it’s the challenge. Just like the honey doesn’t become treif by passing through the bee when challenges ‘pass through us ’ we don’t become treif either. It sweetens our lives and our service to G-d.” Someone could interpret this scene as terrible and dangerous. Just as we’re scared of a tiny bee because it threatens a sting. But after it stings it immediately perishes; it has no holding power because it’s treif. Kedushah on the other hand lasts forever.

The fact that this son comes to his mother to ask what to do about the smoking is so sweet. How we interpret it makes it even sweeter.

This is the idea of how it is in our hands to insure a sweet year. Yes the apple’s already sweet but we also need to do something to insure a good sweet year. We need to dip the apple.

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