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........

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