Opinion & Comment
Real Roots

I met my friend Itzele Friedman by chance one evening after ma'ariv in one of the minyanim in the central shul. "I have a story for you, the kind you like," he said. "Come, let's sit down outside and I'll tell it to you."

So we found ourselves a bench at a far corner of the yard and I settled down next to my friend, eagerly waiting to hear what he had to tell.

"The story begins a few weeks ago when I got a phone call from the U.S. from a man I don't even know. He said his name was Friedman and that he was a pensioner. His particular hobby was genealogy. He was researching his roots and was joined in this hobby by a cousin, also retired and bearing the name Friedman. He knew that an ancestor five generations back had been a resident of Lomza, Poland, and his cousin decided to pick himself up and go to Poland to seek out that branch of the family. He spent his time there burrowing among old records and documents of the municipal institutions in Lomza before World War I. He discovered the name Eliyohu Friedman, whom he imagined to be his great-greatgrandfather. Subsequent searching revealed that one of Eliyohu's descendants, Yosef, had emigrated to Israel with his wife and infant daughter, Chaya Tzipora.

"This scant thread encouraged him considerably, especially since there was no point continuing to search in Poland. So he picked himself up again and landed in Israel. He went to the census bureau and looked up the records kept by the ruling Turks from the 1900s and, to his joy, found Yosef and his family listed among the inhabitants of the land. From here, the path led him straight to the cemetery on Har Hazeisim and to other places. He was further assisted by old records of the Chevra Kadisha.

"His joy was complete when he discovered the grave of his grandfather, a rosh yeshiva, in the cemetery in Givat Shaul. His tombstone testified to his having been the son of that Yosef from Lomza. Nearby, in the same section, he found the graves of several relatives bearing the family name "Friedman." An examination in the offices of the Chevra Kadisha regarding the names he had copied down from those tombstones led him to the nephew of the rosh yeshiva, my mother's cousin, who lives in Jerusalem. From him he received the names and addresses of grandchildren, great- grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, may they increase, living throughout the country.

"You've probably guessed that my name was included in the list, which is how I came to receive a long letter by fax from the two men seeking out their roots and hoping to bring some order into the greater family setup. They wrote about themselves in detail, and their strong desire to make the acquaintance of the rest of their relatives. They would like to set up an organized file of all the descendants of our mutual great- grandfather, Eliyohu Friedman, and even sent me a form to use to fill in every member of my family: my parents, brothers, sisters and all of their children, with their respective birth dates, wedding anniversaries, and the yahrtzeit dates of those who are no longer with us."

"That's marvelous," I said. "To get to know all the relations who are descended from your great- grandfather! I envy you."

"Forget it," said Itzele sadly. "If you had read their detailed letter, as I did, you'd have seen that Judaism is altogether alien to them. I find it difficult to understand their deep affinity to "some old Jew" from Lomza. Why, if that Jew had a chance to visit them in their home, they wouldn't have found a single topic in common with him -- and not only because of the difference in language. Neither they nor their children bear a single sign of Jewishness, and they certainly could not offer their distinguished guest anything to eat in their nonkosher home. What motivates their interest in the details of his life and the lists of his offspring?

"In their letter they ask if we have any drawing or photo of Grandfather Eliyohu or of his son, Yosef. If my answer were positive and they are able to obtain a copy of such an old photograph, a faded, blemished black-and-white picture, they would consider it a tremendous accomplishment in the research of their roots. But -- I ask -- what roots? Would this descendant-researcher be any the wiser for possessing such a picture of someone dating several generations back, with whom he shares some identical genes? What will he have learned from it?

"Come, let us examine what roots actually are.

"The roots of a tree, for example, absorb from the ground the necessary nutrients that build it up. The tree becomes the product of the nutrients which its roots absorbed from the earth. The roots sustain the tree.

"When we are talking about a man who tries to get to know his ancestors, to reveal their identity, the principles that guided them, the focus of their interests and activities, the researcher is actually thrusting roots backward to the human sources and imbibing their motivating ideals, the aspirations by which they lived, the abiding purpose in life for which they toiled and labored and around which they organized their lives. As descendants carrying on their lives, he is marching forward in a direct continuation of that direction, along the path they tread. He continually asks himself a self- regulating question: When will my deeds reach those of my ancestors?

"If his great-greatgrandfather were to wake up from the slumber of the grave and came to visit him, would he be able to kiss the mezuza at his door post, see a bookcase with the selfsame volumes that he studied during his lifetime and from which he drew the guidance and guidelines that structured his life? Aside from external differences, would he find any similarity between the daily spiritual routine of his great-great- grandson and his own? Would every ideological topic that came up involve them jointly as if they had lived in the same period?

"If so, this is a qualitative sequence of generations. This is an essential connective link between a person and his succeeding generations, and the preceding ones, as well.

"I have in my house a photostat of a notebook belonging to my ancestors from a different branch of the family. It contains handwritten ideas developed on the parshas hashovua. I can indeed relate to that grandfather by studying his writings.

"The long letter I received from my distant relative does not even have a single question relating to the qualitative essence of our mutual ancestors. I was not asked if I know anything about their lifestyle or their opinions, or towards which goal they raised their children. Here is a man whose son became famous as a rosh yeshiva in the Torah world, thanks to his numerous students, many of them themselves outstanding figures, and thanks to the works he authored on Shas. Is there any doubt what kind of education he gave his son and what educational message he, himself, received from his own parents? What, from all this, did those amateur genealogists retain?

"I could ask any person: Imagine that your great-great- grandchildren were to make a study of their roots and would memorialize you in some family hall of fame. Let us conjecture that there, they will have recorded your favorite foods, if you were or were not accustomed to taking an afternoon nap, the kind of songs you liked and so on. Would all this have any significant value?

"Why, every logical person understands that it is a person's thoughts that are more `he' than all the above information that includes the size of shoe he wore, a list of the childhood diseases he contracted, the date of his birth and death and from what he died and where.

"The essential and significant data about a person is how he lived his life, his spiritual life-plan and agenda. What will it add to a person to know the stark biographical, physical data about him, or a full list of the groceries he purchased or vegetables he consumed during a given year? These will not contribute a whit to delineating the person he essentially was, the figure we would have liked to know and appreciate as a forebear."

"Itzele," I told him, "everything you said is fine and true and convincing, as well. Perhaps you can convey the spirit of your words to your relatives and stimulate their dry technical curiosity to a more vital spiritual direction which flows through roots from one generation to the next. If you succeed, it would be marvelous!"

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