As many celebrate the Jewish New Year, tables across the world will be set with a familiar sweetness: crisp apples dipped into golden honey. This ritual marks the hope for a year of blessing, abundance, and renewal. Children delight in the stickiness, adults pause for a moment of tradition, and the apple becomes a vessel of prayer.

Apples and honey are central to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The fruit itself carries layers of symbolism: beauty, creation, and divine protection. Honey represents the wish for sweetness in the year ahead. Together, they embody a prayer that this new stage in our lives will lean toward joy.

But as some celebrate with this long-adored tradition, we would do well to ask the question: Who picked these apples? Whose hands brought this sweetness to our table?

The sweetness of this apple ritual is bound to the land. New York is the second-largest apple producer in the country, harvesting over a billion pounds each year. In the Hudson Valley farmers grow modern and antique varieties , and orchards burst with Ashmead's Kernel, Belle de Boskoop, McIntosh, Swiss Gourmet, Honeycrisp, and SnapDragon, their harvest overlapping almost perfectly with the Days of Awe.

Behind this abundance are thousands of Jamaican works who journey north each fall to gather the fruit that graces holiday tables.

Once the canal brought goods to Rondout, they needed vessels to carry them down the Hudson. That’s where the boatyards came in. The waterfront was soon bustling with shipbuilding operations, and once again, immigrants were at the heart of it all. Italian, German, and Eastern European craftsmen brought their skills to the area’s shipyards.

Boatyards employed carpenters, caulkers, metalworkers, and laborers who constructed barges and tugboats critical to the Hudson’s commercial traffic. Businesses like the Cornell Steamboat Company flourished during this time, with immigrants forming the backbone of their workforce. These workers not only kept the maritime economy afloat, they shaped the character of the area’s waterfront neighborhoods, turning them into a thriving industrial hub.

The orchards of upstate New York hum with Jamaican voices. Some men have been coming for thirty years or more, others are just beginning the cycle. Their stories, layered with sacrifice, resilience, and pride reveal the humanity behind the harvest.

James “Jimmy” Spence, a foreman who has worked at Forrence Orchards for over 30 years, leads his crew with a simple mantra: “Get them red, get them big, no drops, no bruises.” (Root, 2017) He is as much a part of the orchard’s rhythm as the trees themselves.

Neville Gray, who has been coming since 1988, spends the season earning wages and shipping 55-gallon drums filled with goods to support his family and community. “You take it back in your pocket, it’s yours,” he says. (Root, 2017)

Mikey, a veteran of Mead Orchards in Dutchess County, marked his 27th season recently. For him, the work is not just about apples, it is about building a better life for his children in Jamaica.

Desmond Gayle, after thirty years in the orchards, points to the injustice of impermanence. Each year, he must start over with a visa, never allowed to stay. “We put so much in and yet at the end of the day, we’re taking nothing out,” he laments. (Root, 2017)

Clifton Heaven, a younger recruit, arrived after Hurricane Irma delayed his travel. Learning from uncles and elders, he picked with humor, noting that even the cold weather had been exaggerated in warnings.

In their downtime, workers cook, play dominoes, watch TV, ride bicycles into town, and gather for meals prepared by Jamaican chefs in orchard commissaries where jerk chicken is a weekly highlight. These details speak to both the familiarity and the distance of their lives here: a temporary home, threaded with reminders of the island left behind.

And yet, for all the dedication, there is fragility. The program has critics who note the lack of protections, reports of pesticide exposure, discrimination, and the fact that there is no pathway to citizenship. The sweetness of the apple is earned through a system that too often leaves workers vulnerable.

As Jewish families dip apples into honey this Rosh Hashanah, the ritual resonates with ancient meaning. But this year, perhaps we might add a new layer to the prayer: gratitude for the Jamaican workers whose hands bring these apples from branch to basket to table.

Their labor embodies both blessing and struggle, just as the New Year embodies both hope and humility. To acknowledge them is to recognize that sweetness is never simple. It is cultivated, harvested, and carried by those often unseen.

So may our holiday tables hold not only apples and honey, but also memory and awareness. May our wishes for a sweet year include justice for those who labor far from home. And may every bite carry with it the possibility of renewal, not only for ourselves, but for the hands that make such sweetness possible.

Shanah Tovah u’Metukah — may you have a good and sweet year!