Of the fifteen needs of the human soul which Simone Weil identifies as essential for human flourishing, rootedness is the most important and, yet, the hardest to define. Her description of rootedness as "real, active and natural participation in the life of a community that keeps alive treasures if the past and has aspirations for the future" seems to point us towards tradition as the key to rootedness. But in our contemporary situation, tradition is a problematic concept: a contested concept in the life of the Church, misused in political discourse. Given these difficulties we might try and avoid the concept altogether. But given the perils of rootlessness have not abated since Weil's time, in fact seem to have become worse, Weil's concept of rootedness should command more attention, even if it remains hard to define. In this paper I attempt to give a fuller account of what kind of tradition is needed with reference to various sources from social anthropology to moral philosophy. In doing so, I show how tradition, which I argue is at the heart of rootedness, can be understood not as a conservative return to some invented perennialism, but a strategy for conservation and liberation in a fractured world.