My name is Seth Raffensperger. I was born in 1983, I’m happily married, and I’m the father of two beautiful children.

That may not have much to do with woodworking on the surface, but it has everything to do with who I am and why I make the things I make.

I grew up outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on a 70-acre farm in a family where art, craftsmanship, tradition, and working with your hands were simply part of everyday life.

My mother studied art and later became an art and gardening teacher at the local Jewish Community Center’s early childhood center. My father started Oak Park Cabinetry in the back room of our farmhouse when I was three years old. From there, the business moved to a small shop in Colonial Park and eventually to Paxton Street, where it remained for more than 25 years.

I was also raised Jewish, and that tradition was part of my life from the beginning.

I grew up going to Chisuk Emuna in Harrisburg. Some of my earliest memories of synagogue are sitting there with books and Matchbox cars while my mom prayed. As I got older, I went to Hebrew school, became a Bar Mitzvah, and continued on through Hebrew High.

Today, that connection has come full circle. My wife and I are raising our daughter Jewish. She attended the same early learning center where my mother once taught and later went on to the Silver Academy.

So when I began making menorahs, I wasn’t simply making a new kind of woodworking project. I was making something connected to my own family, my own memories, and a tradition that has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

Woodworking has been part of my life for almost as long.

I was always drawn to art and architecture, and those interests shaped much of what I studied in high school. By the time I was 12, I was already spending summers helping in my dad’s cabinet shop.

After high school, I began working there while attending Harrisburg Area Community College to study architecture. Schoolwork was never where I felt most at home, and before long I left college to work full-time with my father.

Shortly after that, I became the lead installer.

For the next 25 years, cabinetry became my craft.

I installed custom kitchens, furniture, architectural millwork, and pieces that demanded an enormous amount of precision and attention to detail. I learned how to read a room, how to solve problems that didn’t have obvious answers, how to make something fit when nothing around it was perfectly square, and how to obsess over details most people would never notice.

I always assumed that one day I would take over the family business.

Then life changed.

A few years ago, we learned that the Commonwealth would be taking our building through eminent domain as part of a highway project. A bridge was going to come directly through the property that had been our shop for decades.

I fought hard for the business to continue. I wanted my father to let me take it over and find some way forward.

But after looking at the cost of relocating and rebuilding everything we had created, he made the difficult decision to close.

At the time, I struggled with it.

That shop had been part of my life since I was a kid. I had spent most of my adult life there. I had always imagined that it would someday be mine.

But closing also gave my dad the means to retire, and with some distance, I’ve come to believe that sometimes the end of one chapter is what forces the next one to begin.

After the shop closed, I went to work for a construction company doing framing and whatever else needed to be done.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that construction wasn’t where I belonged.

For the first time in decades, though, I also had something I had rarely had before: time.

I was able to be home with my kids, work around our house, and be present for parts of family life that are easy to miss when you spend 40 or 50 hours a week at work.

I loved that.

But I also felt restless.

Providing for my family has always been deeply important to me, and not knowing exactly what came next weighed on me. I picked up trim work for former customers. I considered kitchen design. I looked at different ways to use the skills I had spent my whole life developing.

Nothing felt quite right.

All along, people kept telling me the same thing.

“You’re an artist.”

They saw something in the work that I had spent most of my life simply thinking of as my job. They saw craftsmanship, creativity, and an ability to make things with wood that had value beyond the hours it took to build them.

My wife saw it too.

She reminded me of the menorahs I had made for my mother and for my Bubbie.

They weren’t products.

They were personal pieces made for people I loved.

She told me that maybe this was where all those years of woodworking were supposed to lead.

So I went back and looked at those menorahs.

And for the first time, I looked at them differently.

I saw more than wood and joinery.

I saw art.

I saw tradition.

I saw my mother. My Bubbie. My childhood. My own family.

I saw something that could sit in the center of a family’s Hanukkah celebration for decades, appear in photographs year after year, be surrounded by children who would someday become adults, and eventually be passed from one generation to another.

And I thought:

Maybe this could work.

So here we are.

After a lifetime spent working in my family’s cabinet shop, I’m building something of my own.

I’m taking everything my father taught me about craftsmanship, everything my mother gave me through art and Jewish tradition, everything I learned through 25 years of woodworking, and turning it into work that feels deeply personal.

Tree of Life Menorah Co. is not a factory.

There is no assembly line.

Every piece begins with wood in my hands and an idea of what it could become.

Sometimes the wood leads the design. Sometimes I do.

Either way, the goal is the same: to create something worthy of becoming part of someone else’s family story.

A menorah that gets lit year after year.

A piece that appears in family photographs.

Something children remember from their childhood.

Something that may one day belong to their children.

That is what Tree of Life Menorah Co. is about.

Not simply making menorahs.

Making things worth keeping.

Judaica With Roots.