Last Shabbat, as I was standing in synagogue, my five-year old son came over to me. We had reached the part of the service where the Kohanim ascend the steps in front of the Holy Ark, cover their heads and arms with their prayer shawls and bless the congregation. The Kohanim have been blessing the people like this for over three thousand years. I covered my own head with my prayer shawl and I felt a light tug from outside. "Daddy, can I come under your tallit?" whispered a young voice.

I brought my son under my tallit, and as the priests were blessing us, our eyes met. I thought, G-d willing, one day my son will be standing in my place, and he too will be looking down into his son's face.

Sometimes you feel like a link in a chain that stretches back across the millennia. Sometimes you understand what tradition really means.

Tradition doesn't mean bagels and lox. Tradition doesn't mean chicken soup and kneidlach. Tradition means passing down the heritage of our fathers intact to our children. Tradition means "My father told me that his father told him that his father told him....that G-d gave us the Torah at Sinai."

The Jewish People believe in G-d, not because the odds that the universe just "happened" out of some primordial cosmic "soup" are gastronomically impossible. The Jewish People believe in G-d not because some missionary landed on our shores and told us some fable that happened away in a manger. The Jewish People believe in G-d not because some whirling Dervish told us to convert or die (a very persuasive theological argument). The Jewish People believe in G-d because we are the great, great, great, great...grandchildren of those same Jews who stood at Sinai and saw and heard G-d speak to them.

We believe in G-d because we hold it axiomatic that parents don't lie to their children about things which it is important for the children to know -- and G-d speaking to an entire nation and making them the chosen instrument of His world-plan certainly qualifies as something important for one's children to know.

This week we begin the synagogue reading of the fifth book of the Torah -- Devarim or Deuteronomy. The Greek title is apt. It means repetition. In the last five weeks of his life, Moshe repeated the entire Torah -- and the entire history of the Jewish People.

Nothing in the Torah is superfluous. Maybe Moshe's intent was to symbolize that the lifeblood of Judaism is the repetition of the parents to the children. For it is this repetition which has carried Judaism across the millennia in an unbroken chain down to a little boy looking up into his father's face under a tallit one Shabbat morning some 3300 years later.