Many religious traditions honor their ancestors. In Judaism, we honor them, but unlike other traditions we don’t make altars to them or pray to them to help us. Indigenous religions spend a lot of time actually praying to the ancestors and trying to connect with them, feeling they are close at hand and always assisting and guiding those of us on the Earth plane.
Yet, we gain much from our ancestors. Not only can we look to science to see that we get our genetic traits from our ancestors, but we also have our traditions handed down to us from those who came before. These may be religious or ethnic traditions. The Jewish world is ripe with such inherited traditions and rituals.
I thought about this today as I read through the this week’s Torah portion, Pinchas, which speak a lot about inheritance. I think we inherit much more than land and money from our ancestors. We inherit a sense of who we are, where we came from and how we should behave or act in the world. We inherit morals and mores. We inherit rituals, prayers, spiritual traditions, beliefs, customs, languages, stories, and so much more–things of much more value than money or land.
This week, think out the inheritance you’ve received from your ancestors and thank them. Offer up a prayer of gratitude to those who came before.
