Five Sisters, a Puritan, and Me – Parshat Pinchas

My father spent decades doing genealogy research, well before DNA kits and apps populated a family tree for you in an afternoon. He disappeared into records and files for years, patiently tracing threads, for no reason except that he wanted to know. Since he passed, I’ve tried to pick up where he left off. On my mother’s side, my Jewish side, the thread simply ends two generations back, somewhere in Russia. History made sure there was nothing left to remember.

So on the days when that dead end gets to me, I click over to my father’s side instead, where the tree branches keep sprawling no matter how far back I go, always with a new lead or a new photo. A few months ago, my daughter came home with a third-grade assignment: find out about the first relative to come to this country. To my surprise, I found a man who sailed from Southampton, England to Massachusetts Bay in 1635, a hundred and forty-one years before there was a country to come to. Behind him, three generations further back, stood his own grandfather,  a Huguenot named Jean Emeris, who got his family onto a boat out of France in 1572, in the days after the crown turned on its own Protestant citizens and the killing spread from Paris across the provinces. Jean’s descendants anglicized the name to Emery. Three generations later, one of them got on another boat.

I sat with my daughter that afternoon holding two family stories that could not look less alike. One of them includes a five-hundred-page genealogical compendium, published in 1890, that I could still order today and a real family crest. The other is a silence with a country’s name attached to it. Both of them are mine.

This week’s parsha carries that same tension, and it happens to fall this year on the day that the United States of America turns two hundred and fifty years old.

Pinchas arrives well past Sinai, after the wilderness, after the plague, after Pinchas himself has already become the hero of last week’s parsha, and already received God’s covenant of peace for it. As we turn to Parshat Pinchas, we find a census being made, instructions for dividing land that hasn’t been conquered yet, and a succession plan, as God tells Moshe to lay his hands on Yehoshua and begin transferring leadership before he’s even permitted to enter the land himself. This is a parsha about a generation that received the founding and now has to figure out how to actually live inside it, how to animate revelation at a mountain to create a real, living, breathing nation. Just in the midst of that logistical and creative work, five sisters approached Moshe.

Tzelophechad died in the wilderness, leaving no sons, only daughters, Machlah, Noa, Choglah, Milcah, and Tirtzah. Under the inheritance law as it stood, Tzelophechad’s portion of the land would have simply passed to his nearest male relative, and his name would be swallowed into someone else’s plot. His daughters, however, walked up to Moshe and asked a question: “Why should our father’s name be lost to his clan just because he had no son? Give us a holding among our father’s brothers” (Bamidbar 27:4). The Talmud, in Bava Batra 119b, calls them chachmaniyot, wise women, and says they brought their claim at an auspicious time, while the system could still be built to include them. God’s answer to Moshe leaves no ambiguity: “the daughters of Tzelophechad speak rightly,” and consequently, the law forever changed.

Their claim was land, a real, adjudicated inheritance, handed down by God through Moshe. Mine is something else entirely: whose names got kept, whose didn’t, and what I owe the ones that didn’t.  What I recognize in those five sisters isn’t the size of what they were owed. It’s the nerve it took to stand up and demand it, in front of Moshe himself and the top echelon of the generation’s leadership at the one moment the whole system was still malleable. And I keep sitting with the strangeness of being a Jewish woman, reaching back through a Puritan line that never once imagined me, using their story to tell mine. I wonder what John Emery would make of that, if he could know. A man who crossed an ocean because a country wouldn’t hold his faith, finding out three hundred years later that his name gets spoken on a Shabbat, by a woman he’d have no framework for, borrowed for an argument about who a system remembers and who it lets slip through. Maybe he’d be baffled by it. Maybe, having once been the one left out of a country’s accounting, he’d understand exactly what those daughters were doing better than I ever could. I don’t get to know. But there’s something that feels almost necessary about reaching for him right now, in a year when Jewish hatred is loud again, ordinary again, sitting in the open in a way I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime. While he wasn’t Jewish, he was hunted for what he believed, and he ran, and he survived it, and something in me needs that thread right now. Not as a metaphor for what my own people are living through, but as proof, in my own blood, that this has happened before and been outlasted before. I like sitting with the question of what he’d think, because it’s the same question underneath everything else here. Not whether the record is fair, but who decides to stand up and make it be, and what it costs to be the one still standing when it counts.

The Torah could have simply stated that the law changed and moved on. Instead it preserved the names of the daughters of Tzelophechad on purpose, more than once, as though someone understood that a victory and the record of that victory are two separate things, and only one of them survives on its own. I know my ancestor’s name for the same reason. A nineteenth-century minister named Rufus Emery decided, in 1890, that his own family’s record was worth keeping, in the same way that my father would decide about ours a century later, and the record survived the crossing. My mother’s family had no one keep that record, or had one and lost the country it lived in. It is the same story, carrying the ending that the daughters of Tzelophechad were refusing to let happen to their own father.

The Sefat Emet, writing on this parsha, notices that the generation standing at the edge of the land in Pinchas is not the one that stood at Sinai. The people who received the revelation directly are almost entirely gone by now and Moshe himself will not cross over. The Sefat Emet reads the census that opens this parsha as a kind of second birth: a new generation, counted individually, asked to make the covenant their own rather than simply inherit it secondhand. Revelation happens once. Renewal has to happen in every generation that comes after, or it calcifies into a stagnant memory instead of a dynamic way of living.

That is exactly what a founding moment demands of everyone who comes after it, which is the question sitting under this country’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, arriving this year on the same day we read this parsha. 1776 was a revelation in its own right –  a document, a declaration, a covenant of ideals. A declaration alone, however, can no more sustain a country than Sinai alone could sustain a nation. What comes after the founding is the unglamorous work Pinchas is actually about: the census, the succession plan, the daughters walking up to insist the structure account for what it left out. Two hundred and fifty years is two hundred and fifty years of generations doing what the Sefat Emet says every generation must do: claiming a founding they didn’t personally witness and making it theirs, in the details, in the institutions, in who gets counted and who gets to inherit.

My family’s two lineages are each, in their own small way, witnesses to that same work. The Huguenots who fled Paris in 1572 were casualties of a nation that had failed to build itself capaciously enough to hold its own religious minorities, a founding degraded into violence for want of renewal. My ancestor got on a boat because the record he was part of had stopped protecting him. My mother’s family, further east and centuries later, was failed by that same refusal, over and over, by nations that would not extend their founding ideals to the people already living inside them. Both halves of my family carry, at the level of blood and displacement, exactly what it costs when a founding is treated as finished rather than as an ongoing obligation.

I don’t think this parsha is asking me to feel grateful that one branch of my family got written down. It’s asking me what I do with that, right now, while there’s still something left to do. Tzelophechad’s daughters didn’t inherit a good record, they built one, by insisting, at the one moment it could still be built. Every one of us is sitting on some version of that same choice: a story that got preserved and a story that didn’t, a founding moment we didn’t witness and a responsibility, now, to renew it rather than simply hold it.

So I invite you this week, on a Shabbat that happens to fall on this country’s birthday, to go find the parts of your own inheritance that survived, and let them stand, not simply as a monument that points backward, but as an inheritance, which like Tzelophechad’s daughters, can be built up in a way that outlives each of us.

We are living through a year when it is dangerous again, in this country, to be visibly Jewish. Somewhere in your own family tree is a thread of someone who was hunted for what they believed and refused to disappear because of it. Most of us are sitting on more safety than that ancestor ever had. More voice, more standing, more room at the table than they were ever offered. That safety is not a place to rest as it is the very thing Tzelophechad’s daughters didn’t have and used anyway, to ensure that their father’s name outlived the system that tried to erase it. So let your record become more than a plaque you visit. Let it become a claim you are still making, on behalf of everyone in your line who never got the chance, and on behalf of the people standing beside you right now who need you to use whatever ground you’re standing on before someone tries to take it from them too. My daughter was sitting beside me at that kitchen table when I found the name that survived. Someday she will read about the five daughters of Tzelophechad who stood in front of the men who ran the world and refused to let their father disappear from it. I want her to know she comes from women like that too, on both sides, whether the record kept their names or not.

Shabbat Shalom.