I can’t trace my Mesorah back that far. I know that my parents got it from theirs, who got it from theirs, etc.
My grandmother a”h once told me that when she came to America after WW2, she saw a Rav looking something up in a sefer, and asked him what the sefer was. “A Shulchan Aruch” he told her. She asked what it was – she honestly had no idea there was a sefer that listed all the halachos of how to live our lives! She really thought it was just passed down from parent to child, and that was it! She held so tightly to the way her parents lived, she even argued with my grandfather on certain things (mostly chumros on Pesach) and insisted that they do it the way she remembered from her parents. And this was when she only had them for a short time! Imagine if the Nazis hadn’t killed her family, and she had her parents for a normal amount of time, how much she would have learned from them!
We don’t need to trace the Mesorah back. As long as we trust that it was passed in an unbroken chain, that’s all we need.
Sadly, there are times when the chain was broken, or a new one was started. People who stopped being frum, and a future generation became baalei teshuva. It’s amazing that a new chain was started (or they latched onto the chain of a Rav who taught them!), but sad that the original one ended. Then a few hundred years ago, a movement began which broke a number of chains, and started a new one.
