I have an annual argument on Facebook with my friend Matt, who responds to our annual opening-day-apple-picking-trip-in-August photos by throwing shade at the sheer audacity of us going to pick apples…in late summer.
This usually sounds like: “You can’t go apple picking in August.” Or, “It’s too early.” Maybe: “The leaves aren’t changing yet.” Perhaps: “It’s basically still summer.” None of those are probably direct quotes, but you can feel the energy.
All of this can be met with something like, “That is such a bizarre thing to say, Matt (et al): the apples are literally hanging on the trees, and the orchard is open, as well as the Hard Cider Barn.”
Not that the rebuttal matters: Haters gonna hate.
But, shocking no one, I’m not winning a social media argument by bringing facts to an emotional, vibes-y gunfight, which in 2026 is such a meta Jewish experience that it pains me.
(This is the moment when it would be supremely easy to go down into the rabbit hole of the latest and greatest highlights from THIS WEEK IN JEWISH HATE, but I promised you last week that I would not do that in my official Rosh Hashanah post, so I will honor that pledge, and instead try something else.)
Back to the apples…and other things apple- and waiting-adjacent.
Every year we convince ourselves that certain things require perfect conditions, but as it turns out, perfect conditions are a myth; I can reasonably assure you that they never happen for anything. You can spend your whole life waiting “until” some qualifying circumstance that never comes, and therefore successfully put something off indefinitely that you probably never intended to do anyway. Put a little differently, if you spend your life waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll miss a lot of perfectly good ones. My suggestion: chase down those moments as hard as you can— you’re not getting any younger.
And also, traditions don’t begin because all the variables finally align; they begin because someone decides to do something and then does it again the following year. In essence, that’s all an opening-day apple-picking trip really is. We went apple picking because we wanted to go apple picking, and eventually the repetition transformed a random Saturday in August into something we now look forward to every year.
The funny thing about traditions is that we think we return to them because they stay the same. But the older I get, the more I suspect the opposite is true.
The orchard is just an orchard. The apples are hanging there doing exactly what apples have always done, and other than the aforementioned Hard Cider Barn, it’s more or less the same experience we’ve had for the past quarter century out in Stow.
We are the variable.
Every year I show up convinced I am returning to a tradition, but every year I discover that life has managed to happen in the meantime. The orchard stays the same. Life does not.
Which, now that I think about it, is a pretty decent description of Rosh Hashanah.
We return to the same place so that we can discover what has changed. The prayers are familiar; ideally, we aren’t.
But really, this is an extra-long way of me saying to Matt, and the rest of you: Don’t tell me when I can and can’t apple pick.
Shana Tovah.
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