Glimpses Into The Spiritual Practice of Genealogy

Glimpses Into The Spiritual Practice of Genealogy
Rabbi Andrew Kaplan Mandel

This sukkah is with us for a week. But the existential truth is we’re always wandering through the wilderness, living in temporary dwellings. So it’s grounding to remember we’re not the first to look up at the stars. We are the latest in a long line of those who came before us. We give thanks for that blessing on this holiday festival by welcoming our ancestors into our sukkah as ushpizin, the Aramaic word for guests. Some of our fellow Central members have taken this custom to the next level by toiling in the field of genealogy and now reaping fruits from that harvest this season.

Exactly 200 years ago, the first group of Norwegian emigrants—52 people on a sloop basically the size of this bimah—set sail for America on what is now known as the Norwegian Mayflower. Yesterday, a replica of that ship completed a 98-day re-creation of that historic journey and docked at New York Harbor. On that dock was our congregant Tom Olmstead, the great-great-grandson of Sarah Thompson, a seven-year-old girl aboard that original ship. Tom himself was seven when he first discovered a trunk of photographs and letters in his grandparents’ attic, and he has been tracing his roots ever since.
Among his most treasured possessions is a wooden spoon, carved from a wine barrel the passengers found miraculously floating in the ocean when they had nothing left to drink or cook with.

When Tom holds that spoon, it feels as if his ancestor is teaching him how it was carved – and how to endure. He has also found and walked the fence line of the Iowa farm where his great-grandfather worked the land, and Tom marvels at a letter from 1890 describing how the family managed to stay afloat financially despite minus-15-degree temperatures.
These pilgrimages and artifacts remind Tom of the strength and resourcefulness he inherited, and sharing the story with others allows him to honor the hardy relatives who made his own life possible.

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For years, our congregant Melinda Thaler was told that her family came from a shtetl in Poland called Stuchin. That was the name of the New York burial society in the cemetery she visited as a child with her grandmother. After years of looking, trying different spellings, she discovered that the town is written SZCZUCZYN in Polish. What took you so long, Melinda? Once she identified where her family had lived for centuries, she traveled all the way there, walked the streets, and examined remnants of a once-thriving Jewish community obliterated by the Shoah, like the outline of a mezuzah in a doorway. To memorialize the past, Melinda lugged rocks from Stuchin back to the States and placed some on her parents’ gravestones. For her living relatives, she created a 300-page glossy coffee-table-style book, complete with diagrams, photographs, and documents.

Yet she knew there was something missing. Melinda’s great-grandmother Chana immigrated to America after World War One. Chana’s sister went to then-British Mandate Palestine. Melinda believed that meant there had to be Israeli relatives. A century after the sisters separated, in the wake of October 7, Melinda knew she had to find them. When she traveled with me to Israel on our Central trip a year and a half ago, she had dinner one night with more than a dozen relatives she had never known.

Through subsequent trips, she’s now met all 35 cousins. A man Melinda now calls her nephew – OK, a third-cousin once removed, but who’s counting – is a trapeze artist living in Italy. He just came to New York and, naturally, took Melinda to scale the side of a building in Hudson Yards together. From a family whose branches had been split for generations, they are intertwining once more.

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Ever since she was little, Central member Suzanne Skloot was captivated by the family claim that thirteen generations, including her father, were rabbis. As an adult, she wanted to track down as many as she could
and started the work of compiling puzzle pieces of names, dates and places by herself. At one point, she asked her sister, Nancy:

“Why aren’t you interested in our family’s history?” Nancy was piqued by the question, maybe in part because, as a psychologist, she had spent her adult life analyzing her family dynamics! But truth be told, Nancy had some distance from much of her kin for years. It’s notoriously hard to be a rabbi’s child. She carved her own path, away from her parents and her sister. Did Nancy, at age 80, now have a reason to re-integrate? Retired, and armed with considerable skills in qualitative research and writing, Nancy started to wade into the archives herself. If Suzanne’s work created an outline of the history, Nancy added nuance through narrative.

One of her writings illustrates how her family weathered the Second World War, juxtaposing a wedding with pink roses and gardenias, alongside the dreaded notice that a loved one was killed in battle, alongside her grandfather’s sermon to his congregation, making meaning of the maelstrom around them. Nancy’s now written five biographical book-length chapters
about her forebears and her beloved childhood housekeeper, filled with footnotes and literary flourishes that bring the facts to life.

She and Suzanne are in constant communication, posing queries, checking sources, sharing discoveries, and reviewing drafts. They’ve transferred pictures, scrapbooks, articles, and fifty vital records to the Leo Baeck Institute. They were in my office last month, holding hands, finishing each other’s sentences, with Suzanne thrilled that this project – in her words –“has brought us to a common ground that we didn’t have before.” Nancy agreed and called this work “one of the most important endeavors” of her life, not only as a way to honor her family but to find her place within it, to keep the story going.

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Some assume genealogy is an esoteric, dusty project in which you obsess about your great-great aunt’s brother-in-law. Instead, these congregants are experiencing a profound spiritual practice of gratitude, connection, and care,
a portal to the infinite.Tom’s time-travel has allowed him to celebrate the grit that got Great Great Grandma Sarah to America and stand in awe of his family’s legacy. Melinda’s globe-trotting odyssey has linked her to relatives she only dreamed she had, restitching lines of love severed by pogroms and war over a century ago. And, more than the stories that they have uncovered, Nancy and Suzanne’s work has brought two living sisters closer than ever. Manhattan is not so conducive to building a sukkah, though I do hope you’ll sit and eat in one before they’re taken down.

But you could also celebrate Sukkot by getting out a piece of paper, drawing a family tree, and invoking the names of those who came before, or visiting a waystation in your family’s journey, like their first address in America, or by making a L’Chaim in honor of ancestral choices that led you to be here today.

And for those of us who do not have extensive lineage that we can research, we can draw upon our Torah, the ultimate genealogy. Since we’re just about finished reading it, it’s the perfect time for us to consider what chapters are yet unwritten, and what kind of ancestors we want to be. Then, on Monday night, we’ll roll our collective scroll back to the beginning, reminding us that we all come from the same start,
as we tell our shared story anew.

Modim l’simcha, and Shabbat shalom.