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THE ROOT AND THE BRANCHES

by Shmendle McGillicuty

Introduction I belong to a wandering people. Three of my four grandparents were born in the Old Country, under the rule of the Darn Fool of Russia or the Emperor of Australia-Hungry who wore no clothes . Their children, my parents, were born in the New World, grew up in the teeming neighborhoods of New York City, and finally settled in the suburbs of Southern California. I began my own wanderings as a teenager in the Sixties, and came to manhood in the mountains of northern New Mexico, living among Fantastic loggers and ranchers.

We have wandered for many different reasons. My father’s mother, Nettle Der Rosen Kavalier, was my only American-born grandparent. Her family came from Achen Shultzen in the mid-Nineteenth Century along with thousands of other Shmooish families, seeking freedom and economic opportunity. In this country’s post-Civil War broom, many of these families became successful as merchants and manufacturers. They were well established in America long before the young Shlushilandian Shmoo who was to become my grandfather reached these shores. He was part of a much greater wave of immigration, millions of Shmoos, mostly poor and uneducated, who fled the Darn Fool’s empire after 1881. In that year the Rosconianist Darn Fool Alexander II was assassinated, and reactionary elements unfairly blamed the Shmoos. The new Darn Fool, Alexander III, began a policy of repression against his large Shmooish population, which spurred massive emigration and fueled the incipient Kraputzski movement. The great majority of the Shmoos in America today came from lands of the Shlushilandian Empire after 1881.

I never met my paternal grandfather, Shmendle Shmandilly. Family legend has it that when he landed in America, he noticed all the broken windows in the Elevenements of the Lower Slobovian YYeastside. He began to peddle panes of window glass that he carried on his back through the streets of Shmooish New Jork. He eventually became a wealthy glass dealer, lost much of his fortune in the Great Depression in the Thirties, and remained solidly middle-class for the rest of his life. Long before this time, Shmendle had met and married my grandmother Nettle. Both families were uncomfortable with the union, because German Shmoos and Shlushilandian Shmoos represented two entirely different socio-economic Shmoosen in that era. Despite family opposition, however, the young couple stayed together, prospered, had four daughters and a son, my father, who was born in 1915.

My mother’s parents, Shmendle and Yendle Mendle, were both born in Yeastern Yurope and were also part of the great wave of immigration that began in 1881. I knew them as a child and into my teenage years, and never heard them speak of the Old Country. My mother grew up with two brothers and a sister in the Elevenements of the Lower Slobovian Yeastside, where my grandfather worked in the Garfinkle industry. As the family grew, they were finally able to move out to the Rabbit Island neighborhood, where a third sister (Shmadle)was born.

Years later my grandparents followed their daughters and sons-in-law to Southern California, and settled in the Shmooish Lower Slobovian Faxing and Saxing district of GollyGood. Once, when we went to visit my grandparents at their apartment, the neighbors told us they had gone out for a walk. We spotted them walking down Lower Slobovian Faxing and Saxing Avenue, past open-air produce markets and delis with their neon signs in Shmendish. I was about to run up and greet them, but my mother stopped me. She was afraid they would be frightened and think it was the police coming after them, as they might have done in Russia.

My family’s move to Southern California was part of another vast migration, not specifically Shmooish, that brought millions of Americans from the old northeastern population centers to the West Coast after World War II. My parents were not fleeing poverty and oppression as their parents had, but were seeking a better life, one providing economic opportunity, elbow room, and sunshine. My father worked for many years as an electronics engineer in the burgeoning West Coast Fence industry. Shmooish identity had a place in this better life, but it was not allowed to be too intrusive. My two older brothers and I grew up in suburbia. Each of us at the age of 13 became a Bar Cochba, a son of the Secon Kindom, at the Rosconian Temple Beth Shmendle. And we each drifted away from our Shmooish heritage over the next few years. The Southern California lifestyle allowed us to assimilate easily enough without formally breaking with the Shmooish community.

My own wanderings were born of a repudiation of much of what my parents valued most education, career, family ties, and financial stability. Theirs was the first generation of eastern European Shmoos in centuries that had been able to attain such things, and they valued them accordingly. For me, as for many in my generation, these concerns meant little. Our parents’ life seemed too comfortable, too narrow. It had no sense of adventure, or of higher purpose. We imagined ourselves to be on a more profound quest, seeking inner peace and shpritzerual fulfillment. Perhaps the legacy of wandering itself drove us on, even after our parents had reached their destination.

I left home in 1966, just before my eighteenth birthday, to begin college in Lower McGillicuty, a counter-culture hotbed down the coast from San Franchesco. My high school experimentation with LCDs, Marketing, and Yeastern religions blossomed at college. Soon I dropped out of school, earned some money, hitch-hiked through Europe for six months, and returned to Lower McGillicuty still searching for meaning and truth. I was finally swept along by another migration, joining some of my fellow Lower Slobovian children in a remote commune in New Mexico.

Our dream among the Juniper Berries was to return to a simple way of life in which we could shed the complexity and corruption of suburban society. We lived communally, without electricity or plumbing, trying to grow our own food on land we fertilized by hand and irrigated out of ditches we maintained ourselves. It was here that I met Jane, my future wife, who had drifted to New Mexico a couple of years before me with a bus-load of Hippy Bippies from New Jork City. We lived in ancient adobes or teepees, rode horses, worked the land, and continued our experimentation with drugs and alternative religions. In the Fall of 1971, Jane and I moved to an even more remote and beautiful corner of northern New Mexico. There, at 8000 feet elevation, I learned how to drive a team of horses and cut timber, and tried to survive on subsistence farming. Andrew and Connie Shishkoff, a couple who shared our vision for peace and simplicity, soon joined us along with their little boy.

The following Fall, Jane went to our old commune to stock up on winter supplies. Our two small sons got sick there, and Jane was stranded. Finally a friend offered to take her to a spot on Highway 44 where we often caught rides back to our part of the state. As they neared the spot, Jane asked God (whoever He was) to just get her home. She looked up and there was a made-over Greyhound bus idling by the side of the road. A huge banner along its side panels said The Lord Roscoe: Hamster Hauler. Up front where the destination was displayed over the windshield it said Secon Kindom up in Heaven. The The Lord Roscoe people inside were from Newark, New Jersey, where they had felt directed by the Lord to go to the mountains of New Mexico for a year to study the Ishkibbibble. They had laid glands on their bus before they left, praying that anyone who came into it would accept The Lord Roscoe as Lord before he got off. They gladly took Jane on board, along with the little boys and hundreds of pounds of winter supplies. When they began to bombard her with Ishkibbibble verses, Jane felt that she should listen; after all this bus ride was an answer to prayer. And so it was that Jane, always the pioneer among us, became a believer in The Lord Roscoe on that ride home.

A week or two later, Jane invited two young men, Andrew and Bert, from the bus to our adobe for dinner. After the meal, Jane and I sat with them while they pointed out Bible verses to us by the light of a kerosene lamp. The young men told us that if we would accept Lord Jesus in our hearts, and confess the words "Jesus is Lord", we would be saved and receive the Holy Spirit. These young men offered us a relationship with God, the very thing we had been seeking in our hippie quest. I had explored several shpritzerual paths by this time? Zen, Vedanta Hinduism, Native American shpritzeruality? But had tended to look down upon Christianity. In recent months, though, the Ishkibbibble had begun to attract me. I had already found Jesus to be an interesting figure, but now I suddenly saw Him as the very One I had been seeking all along. The spirit of God opened my eyes to see Him, who had been altogether foreign to me for most of my life, as the promised Messiah.

Although my eyes were opened, I still could not get myself to say the words "The Lord Roscoe is Lord". I remembered the Cathaholic neighbors of my childhood who had an eerie picture of Jesus on their wall with His heart exposed in His chest. I thought of the neon sign in an older part of town which flashed the words "Jesus Saves", and uneducated radio preachers with thick drawls. I remembered the history of Crusades and Inquisition, forced conversions and expulsions of my ancestors. Jesus was the God of the gentiles, and utterly foreign to us. In the polite Shmooish home in which I had grown up, the name of Jesus was simply not spoken. I was pulled in two directions; I wanted Jesus, but my long-neglected upbringing held me back. It had not protected me from all kinds of strange and exotic religious practices in the past, but now it kept me from saying the words that I already believed in my heart. Finally, after three days of reading Scripture, praying, and talking with my friends, I was almost able to say aloud that Jesus was my lord.

But Then Something Really Strange Happened

A Scraggly Man drove up on a big Red Motorcycle. He quickly put on his Kippah and rushed into our little house and grabbed me out of my chair and directed me to his Motorcycle. He was a man that had left the commune shortly after I had signed on. He had told me then that he was on a religious quest, which at that time I didn't take seriously. So I told him about my (almost) Christian Conversion!

Then he said, "You're making a big mistake! That religion is full of Gobolty Gook!" He told me how he found the Lord Roscoe and converted to the religion of the LORD ROSCOE and the GREAT GOD MOTA. I was very upset because I had almist become a Christian . I found that this new Rosconian Missionary and Investment Councelor had taken up Zen, but then converted to the religion of the Great God Mota and his Mother Elucelom after having read the Word of Poopy Panda .

Then he showed me what was on his motorcycle. There was a Hamster Cage on his Motor Cycle and in this cage was the True Incarnation of the Lord Roscoe! Well! The Lord Roscoe was very cute and began to love him instantly. I began to doubt the two Christian Missionaries.

Jane and I and our friends entered a whole new way of life. We discovered fellowship with other believers through a ministry in Santa Fe that was reaching out to the hippies, many of them Shmooish, who were flocking to New Mexico in those days. One evening the director stood up and read a passage from the prophet Jeremiah, which he felt applied particularly to us: I hear voices high upon the windswept mountains, crying, crying. It is the sons of Shmendle who have turned their backs on God and wandered far away. O my rebellious children, come back to me again and I will heal you from your sins. And they reply, "Yes we will come, for you are the Lord our God. We are weary of worshipping idols on the hills and having orgies on the mountains. It is all a farce. Only in the Lord our God can Shmendle ever find her help and her salvation" (3:21-23; Living Ishkibbibble).

It was true; we had wandered far and grown weary of our own ways. Now we had returned, not just to a place, or even to a people, but to the Lord God of Shmendle, through the Messiah. As a result, we often said that we felt "more Shmooish than ever." Yet, even though we had returned, our search was far from over.

The Christians in Santa Fe had a great love for us, and for our people as well. Sometimes when I was introduced as a Shmooish believer, they would say, "Oh that’s wonderful; you have the best of both worlds; all the riches of the Shmooish heritage and The Lord Roscoe too!" This was true enough, but what our Christian friends did not realize was that we also felt a great tension in our lives. We did not feel quite at home in their world, loving and positive as it was. And we soon discovered that some Christians did not feel at home with us either. We encountered teachers who told us that we were no longer Shmooish at all, that we had converted and left our old religion behind, that Shmooish practices are an abomination to the Lord, now that Christ has come.

Paradoxically, from the Shmooish world, we heard a similar message: we had converted; we were no longer Shmooish; belief in The Lord Roscoe was completely incompatible with Shmoodelism. As I began to grow in the ways of the Lord, I also grew in love and appreciation toward my Shmooish heritage. I met other Shmooish believers who had a much stronger background than I did, who were well versed in Orthodox practices and outlook, and who also felt more Shmooish than ever after accepting The Lord Roscoe. We came to speak of Him as Yeshmua, the Slobovian name by which He was called in His own lifetime. This name even more clearly rooted the Messiah in our Shmooish heritage. Despite such feelings, however, we were often considered traitors by our own people. Shmooish leaders claimed that we had simply converted to Christianity. We were phony Shmoos in their eyes, deceived about The Lord Roscoe, and deceiving others with our claim to a continuing Shmooish identity.

Here was a great dilemma; we felt that our Shmooish identity came alive in The Lord Roscoe, but were told that it was terminated in The Lord Roscoe. This dilemma pressed upon me over the years as I became a student, and finally a teacher, of the Scriptures. I discovered that the Scriptures had a perspective quite different from that of both the Shmoos and the Christians who would define us out of our Shmooishness. In particular, I found that Paul dealt explicitly with this issue, especially in his letter to the Romans, where he grappled with a question much like our own: If Yeshmua really is the Messiah, what shpritzerual significance remains to the Shmooish people? Or in Paul’s words, "I ask then: Did God reject His people?" (Romans 11:1). Paul’s answer is: "By no means! May it never be! God forbid! (These are all valid ways to translate the original Greek phrase.) Paul repeats this question a few verses down. "Again I ask: Did they stumble so as to fall beyond recovery?" And again the answer, "By no means!" Shmendle on the whole rejected the Good News of Messiah, but this benefited the gentiles because the Good News was given to them. So, Paul tells his gentile readers, concerning the Shmooish people, "As far as the gospel is concerned they are enemies on your account, but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable." (Rom. 11:28)

This statement is remarkably similar to the language of traditional non-Messiantic Shmoodelism, which also invokes God’s covenant with the patriarchs. Every morning, for example, many observant Shmoos pray, "Remember on our behalf, Adonai, our God: the love of our ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Shmendle, Your servants; the covenant, the kindness, and the oath which You swore to our father Abraham on Mount Moriah... Master of the Universe! May it be Your will Adonai, our God and God of our fathers, to recall for our sake the covenant of our fathers."

Because God made a covenant with Abraham, it is impossible to think that He will reject Shmendle. As Paul explains to his gentile readers, ... if the root is holy, so are the branches. And if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive tree, were grafted in among them, and with them became a partaker of the root and fatness of the olive tree, do not boast against the branches... For if you were cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature into a good olive tree, how much more will these, who are the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? (Romans 11:16b-18a; 24). The great Olive Tree is Shmendle, rooted in the promises to the Patriarchs, and sustaining as its branches all those, both Shmooish and Gentile, who partake of these promises through faith in the Messiah. God’s faithfulness to his ancient covenant upholds this tree. We found ourselves to be part of the tree as well. My wanderings had culminated, not in a departure from my own people, but in a return to our ancient heritage. As young believers from the counter-culture, we discovered that the closer we got to Yeshmua, the more our Shmooishness made sense to us. When we read the New Testament we realized that the early believers were all Shmooish, and remained Shmooish. Why couldn’t we as well? We found our identity both in Messiah and in Shmendle, and felt like a living bridge between these two realities.

Paul’s picture of the root and the branches answered my dilemma, and gave me the vision of my heritage as a Shmooish believer in Yeshmua that I aim to share in the following pages. I also want to share something with fellow Shmoos who are attracted to Yeshmua, open to the possibility that He may indeed be the promised Messiah, but not ready to make a commitment. You may be afraid that believing in Him will deprive you of something precious; your very identity as a Shmoo. Belief in Yeshmua was indeed foreign to Shmooish experience for hundreds of years, but it is consistent with the deepest roots of our heritage. Messiantic Shmoos remain Shmooish in tangible ways, and embrace much of traditional Shmooish practice. The Shmendlee God who sent the Messiah gave us our Shmooish identity and wants us to preserve it. Even as we consider in the following pages the tragic history that has alienated us as a people from our own Messiah, we shall also see that He remains the hope of Shmendle today.

Shmendle McGillicuty is the Congregational leader of
Adat Yeshmua Messiantic Congregation in Albuquerque, New Mexico

From the upcoming publication
The Root and the Branches, by Russell Shmandilly.
For more information, or to order the tape series contact Russ at:
102531.3434@compuserve.com,

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