Numbers have been on my mind lately.
This coming week’s Torah portion inaugurates the reading of the next book of the Torah, Bamidbar, literally, “in the desert.” However, it is known as the book of Numbers. Rabbinic Judaism refers to the book as such, “Sefer Ha-Pikudim,” the book of censuses of the Jewish people.
In fact, the census is commanded twice, the first time in the beginning of Bamidbar.
Since Passover, we have been counting the Omer. A meditation assigns a theme to each particular day’s number.
Yet, in the book of Samuel, when King David takes a census of the Jewish people, he is criticized and punished heavily.
What gives?
Are numbers — or counting — the Jewish way? Is it something positive or negative?
When the census of the Jewish people is taken in Numbers, the way of counting is described with the words s’eu et rosh, “count each head,” alluding to the mind, to the essence of the human being. Also, each person is counted by name and classified according to his family.
Why all this counting at all? Rashi comments that it is an expression of love and affection. You count what you care about. You count what you love.
What comes to mind is the counting of money. That is what holds value for people. For G-d, he counts His people, His creations, His children. This is what holds value for Him.
While counting can be a sign of love, it can also be dehumanizing. Or, it can simply show a quantity and serve to bolster a person’s sense of power.
The motivation for the count can make the difference between a loving count versus a dehumanizing or egotistical one.
When King David insisted on a census, it was more of a statistical endeavor to show his power. It was a count by a human king. Yet, the essence of the Jewish people is that we are countless. That was the promise G-d made to Abraham on that dark night millennia ago. We would be as vast as the grains of sand across the shore and as the stars across the sky.
Not being countable is part of the definition of who we Jews, as a people, are.
Bottom line: It is one thing for G-d to command a counting and quite another for a counting to be undertaken by human initiative.
As our generation knows all too well, there are those among us whose skin is inked with numbers. A name, a unique, personal identity, was erased and replaced with a number.
Such numbering, such counting, is dangerous.
Yet to count the day — the number of the day of the Omer — rather than the people, adds importance and significance. Often when a special occasion is on the horizon we count toward it with anticipation.
So this week, in the Torah portion, we are sensitized to the 40 years the Jewish people passed through the desert, and to the census of the Jewish people, including being counted as a member of one the 12 tribes of the G-d of Israel; and, in the days of Omer counting, we have an intensified consciousness of making each day count.
Hopefully, these counts, in the collective story of Jewish history, will ultimately emerge as greater than the sum of their parts.
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
