As the hours near the beginning of Rosh HaShanah I have been working away at getting the house ready.

I  made an apple tart yesterday as I worked I was remembering years part getting ready for the Holiday.  Years ago as I was learning how to cook I  was into specialized tools. Lately, not so much.

This is how I core apples.

This works easier than an apple corer or a melon baller.

There are meringues for dessert along with the apple tart.

I made up lemon cookies to use up the egg yolks. They are very lemony.

As I was putting together  the challah for the next several days I thought about how often bread is used as a metaphor in Judaism.  Bread is both the staff of life as well as being something of a symbol for sin. Tomorrow, many of us will be taking bits of bread, symbols of sin and tossing them into bodies of water. I will be seeing many of you along the Hudson tomorrow afternoon doing one of the sweetest and most profound things of living in New York, gathering actross communities to think about our own failings and re-connect with one another. getting rid of Chametz before Passover is both physical and spiritual.

Bread is about the transformation of rotten stuff, soured dough, into something good. This year I have been making sour dough bread, where you essentially get bread dough hand around for a few days, get bad and then use that soured dough to create really delicious bread. 

I have also been using an old German bread making technique where I use stale bread as the starter for new bread. In both methods something that is spoiled is the basis for something new and transformed.

My wise friend Solomon Mowshowitz always says that one needs a little bit of the yetzer ha ra, the evil inclination, because without a little bit of greed no one would bother working and without a little bit of lust no one would have children.

During this season of looking inward, of thinking about how we have failed, We also need to remember that we can take the rotten and the stale in our lives and transform it.

This year in particular, the prayer of the High Priest on Yom Kippur seems especially appropriate.