21/05/2026
🕯️ The Torah gives us 613 commandments. It also gives us something quieter: a record of who came from whom.
Shavuot begins this evening, the festival when we mark receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai.
We often speak of the Torah as a book of law: 613 commandments, ethics, a framework for living. And it is. But it is also a book of genealogy, of people, families, and the ties between them.
"These are the generations of..."
The Torah pauses, again and again, to record who came from whom: which parents, which children, which family, which tribe. Whole passages exist simply to map a lineage, to hold the line between one generation and the next.
That instinct didn't end at Sinai. It's the same one that makes someone open a drawer of old documents and wonder: where do I actually come from? From whom?
Most of us carry that question. The names of those who came before us. The lives they lived. The links that connect them to us across generations.
For Ashkenazi Jewish families, those answers are often assumed to be lost, a town whose name was half-remembered, a branch of the family that the 20th century scattered. Yet the records exist far more often than people imagine. They are simply spread across archives, languages, and borders, waiting to be connected.
The Torah reminds us that knowing where we come from is worth preserving. I help families recover exactly that: the names, the places, and the family ties that tell them who they are.
Wishing you a meaningful Shavuot — חג שבועות שמח 🌿
What's one story about your family you'd want your children to still know in fifty years? 👇
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