By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

In my chaplaincy, I’ve been introducing the individuals (and staff) to Jewish foods connected to our many holidays. We made latkes for Hanukkah last year, hamantashen (most of which didn’t hold their shapes) for Purim, a version of matzah brei for Passover (served with the traditional Ashkenazic charoset I brought in from home), and surprisingly good homemade blintzes for Shavuot (with store-bought cheesecake in case the blintzes bombed, which they did not). 

This will be the first High Holiday season since we began this particular practice at the day program and I decided to research possibilities for what we might make. When Broome Developmental Center was open, we had apples and honey, along with a variety of cookies, to wish everyone a sweet new year. (Side note: one of the staff so liked the apples and honey, that he told me that he started bringing them to parties.) This led me to think about other traditions, including one that was never done by my family and which I am not going to suggest to those I work with: eating fish heads. (OK, I might suggest it as a joke, but, hmm, I doubt anyone will want to take me up on it.)

Of course, I became curious about how the custom began, although finding a satisfactory answer was not easy. One reason – which made sense to me from knowing about other food customs – was offered by the website Flavor of Diaspora, which noted that “in a historical context, we probably picked up this tradition from pagan and Christian neighbors in Europe and the Middle East in the early, pre-Islamic Middle Ages. Many food traditions then (and now) were iconographic: people ate in a way that imitated what was commemorated. Another culture probably had a fish head tradition, and we adopted it.”

A more religious explanation for eating fish heads on Rosh Hashanah is based on a play on words. Rosh means head, so Rosh Hashanah is the head – meaning the beginning – of the new year. People began to eat fish heads as a symbol of this and, before eating, would say, “May we be heads, not tails,” meaning leaders not followers. Why fish heads? I couldn’t find any information on that either, although I did discover that some Sephardic communities have a custom of eating a sheep’s head, rather than a fish head. The reason given is that it’s in memory of the ram who was sacrificed instead of Isaac in the Akedah (the binding of Isaac), one of the Torah readings for Rosh Hashanah. According to one article, Persian communities eat tongue, which I like on a deli sandwich, but not so much when my mother cooked a cow’s tongue and served it years ago. (It looked too much like a large-sized human tongue.)

People who want to keep the custom, but don’t want to serve fish heads as a separate dish, will roast a whole fish so its head can be eaten. Some will cut off the tail as a reminder that we are supposed to be leaders (heads), rather than followers (tails). I read several articles that talked about the importance of the custom as a reminder of how we are supposed to behave. They suggested that it is especially important in contemporary times, although I’d bet similar lectures have been given over the centuries.

Whatever you decide to eat for Rosh Hashanah, I want to wish you a happy, healthy, sweet New Year. Shanah tovah!