Rabbi in Baltimore is busy with beekeeping
BALTIMORE—With the nation’s honeybee population in decline, as it has been for more than a dozen years, something of a resistance movement has come to life in the humblest of places: America’s backyards.
The number of Americans raising bees on their own property has doubled over the past 10 years, according to the American Beekeeping Federation.
With her single hive of 20,000 Western honeybees, Rabbi Kelley Gludt is far from the biggest player on Baltimore’s backyard beekeeping scene. But this time of year, she might be the most devoted.
Rosh Hashana, the two-day Jewish New Year observance, begins at sundown Sunday. When it does, Jews around the world will dig into a variety of sweet traditional foods, and honey will play the same central role in those customs it has for thousands of years.
Gludt and her husband, Rob, began harvesting the honey from the hive in their Mount Washington yard this week as they do shortly before Rosh Hashana every year, and the process of reaching inside and removing just enough of the honey— and no more—reminded her, as usual, of how profoundly the hobby reflects the meaning of the holiday, one of the most important on the Jewish calendar.
“Jews all know the tradition of dipping apples in honey (for Rosh Hashana) and how it represents the hoped-for ‘sweetness’ of the new year,” said Gludt, the director of educational programming at Beth Am Synagogue, a Conservative congregation in Reservoir Hill. “But honey from bees also carries that sting of God’s judgment as well as the sweetness of God’s mercy.
An early appearance of honey is in the Book of Exodus, when God is described as promising Moses he’ll one day bring the Israelites to “a land flowing with milk and honey”— metaphors, most agree, for a place of prosperity, ease and abundance. The only female judge mentioned in the Bible was Deborah, whose name in Hebrew, “Devorah,” means “bee.”
And honey figured centrally in the Old Testament story of Samson, who is said to have found a beehive and honey in the skeleton of a lion he’d killed with his bare hands, a discovery central to the riddle he posed to the Philistines.
Honey became central to Jewish cuisine over the millennia, especially on Rosh Hashana, when observant Jews reflect on past misdeeds, ponder the implications of their errors, make atonement through prayer and fasting, and hope for the clean slate and clear mind that come with divine forgiveness.
Most famously, the central home ritual of Rosh Hashana involves dipping apple slices in honey, a custom traditionally carried out during the recitation of a special prayer for Shana Tova u’Metuka— “a good and sweet year.”
Ashkenazi Jews have long made lekach, or honey cake, a sweet staple of the holiday as well, and boil teiglach—small knotted traditional pastries—in a honeyed syrup. Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews dip challah, the traditional braided bread, in honey at meals throughout Rosh Hashana.