Everyone knows the apple and the honey. Dip, bless, eat, feel optimistic about the year ahead. It is a lovely custom and it is also, it turns out, the tip of a much bigger table.
Long before apples and honey became the default American Rosh Hashanah image, Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa were sitting down to something more elaborate: a full sequence of symbolic foods, each one paired with a short blessing, each blessing built on a pun. This custom has a name. It is called the simanim, from the Hebrew word for signs or omens, and the ritual meal built around them is often called the Rosh Hashanah seder, borrowing the same word used for the Passover meal because it too means order.
Where the Custom Comes From
The idea is not folk superstition tacked onto the holiday. It traces back to the Talmud, where the sage Abaye is quoted saying that since omens matter, a person should make a habit of eating certain foods on Rosh Hashanah: gourd, fenugreek, leek, beet, and dates. The logic is not magical thinking so much as intentional living. You are not asking the food to change your fate. You are using the food to say the wish out loud, in Hebrew and Aramaic, at the exact moment you are setting intentions for the year. Each item gets its own small blessing, usually opening with the words Yehi ratzon, "may it be Your will," followed by a request that plays on the food's name.
The Apple and the Honey Everyone Knows
Start with the familiar one, because it deserves its place. A slice of apple dipped in honey, eaten with a wish for a sweet new year. It is simple, it is universally beloved, and if you only know one Rosh Hashanah food tradition, this is almost certainly it. It is also the custom most associated with Ashkenazi Jewish communities, the ones whose roots trace to Central and Eastern Europe, which is why it became the dominant image of the holiday in American Jewish life.
The Round Challah and the Pomegranate's Many Seeds
Alongside the apple, the everyday braided challah gets swapped for a round one, its shape a wish that the year comes back around to good rather than running off the rails. Many families dip that round loaf in honey too, for good measure. Then there is the pomegranate, or rimon, which shows up because of its seeds. Tradition holds it is packed with a great many of them, and the wish said over it asks that our good deeds be as numerous. You will sometimes hear that number tied to the 613 mitzvot in the Torah. Treat that as a beautiful teaching rather than a produce fact. Nobody is counting seeds at the table.
Dates, Leeks, and the Wordplay That Makes It Work
This is where the Sephardic and Mizrahi custom, the one carried by Jewish communities from Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East, really shows its craft, because almost every item is chosen for how its name sounds rather than how it tastes.
Dates, tamar in Hebrew, sound like the word yitamu, "may they end," so the blessing asks that our enemies, or in gentler framings our troubles, come to an end. Leeks or scallions, karti, echo yikartu, "may they be cut off," carrying the same request in a different vegetable. It is the kind of pun that only works out loud, at a table, in the language it was written in, which is part of why the custom rewards being said in Hebrew or Aramaic rather than translated.
Beets, Gourds, and Black-Eyed Peas: The Rest of the Sephardic Seder
The pattern keeps going. Beets, silka in Aramaic, play on yistalku, a wish that our adversaries depart. Gourd or squash, kra, plays on two ideas at once: yikaru, that our merits be proclaimed, and the sense of a decree being torn open and reconsidered. And fenugreek or black-eyed peas, rubia, plays on yirbu, "may they increase," a wish for abundance and merit in the year ahead. Said one after another, blessing by blessing, the whole sequence turns a dinner table into something closer to a spoken prayer with snacks between the lines. Communities differ on the exact order and the exact substitutions, which is normal. This is a living custom, not a fixed script, much like the range of dishes covered in our guide to Rosh Hashanah dates and traditions.
The Head, and Not the Tail
Then comes the one that gets the most raised eyebrows from newcomers: the head. Some families serve a fish head, others a lamb or ram's head, and increasingly many use a head of lettuce or garlic as a gentler stand-in. The blessing draws on rosh, the same word that opens Rosh Hashanah, "head of the year," and asks that we be a head and not a tail, a wish rooted in a line from Deuteronomy about leading rather than trailing. Fish carries an extra layer of meaning too: fish multiply quickly, a wish for a fruitful year, and their eyes never close, a wish to stay watchful and aware.
Two Tables, One Wish
If you grew up with nothing but apples and honey, none of this is a contradiction. It is simply the fuller version of a custom that got trimmed down as Ashkenazi tradition became the loudest voice in American Jewish culture. Plenty of Sephardic and Mizrahi families never stopped doing the full simanim seder, right alongside the same apples and honey everyone else knows. If you want to see how these food customs sit next to the rest of the holiday, from the shofar to the ten days that follow, our newcomer's guide to the High Holidays walks through the whole arc. And if the pun-driven, wordplay-heavy approach to a holiday table sounds familiar, it should. It runs on the same instinct as the differences we cover in Ashkenazi versus Sephardic Passover traditions, two branches of one people, telling the same story with different food on the table.
Whichever table you are sitting at this year, the wish underneath all of it is the same one. A good year, a sweet year, and a few well-chosen bites to say so out loud. Shana Tovah U'Metukah.