This week we enter the Book of Numbers – the only one of the Five Books of Moses, when you stop to think about it, which has a plain sense English name. Genesis, Exodus, these words are Greek imports, Leviticus is Latin, and Deuteronomy is both – a Latinization of two Greek words.
But no such fancy foreign name for the book we now begin. It’s just humble Numbers, and indeed, as the Torah portion begins, Moses is taking a census. No, hang on, census is a Latin word. Moses is counting the people of Israel. He is numbering them.
Or at least some of them – men of fighting age, men aged 20 years old and up, kol yotze tzava, all those who can bear arms.
For the Children of Israel are in the desert, Bamidbar, 13 months since the Exodus from Egypt, preparing, it seems, to march in some kind of military formation into the Land of Canaan.
We know, as the Israelites being numbered do not, that these particular tribesmen will never enter the land promised by God to their ancestor Abraham, Avraham avinu. God will find them unworthy – so unworthy that God will wait for this generation to die off and be replaced by a new generation deserving to inherit the land of Israel. This generation stumbles and errs and fails so much in the wilderness that the scholar Shemaryahu Talmon suggests that Numbers might better be called “The Book of Israel’s Failings.”
But that’s all in the future for the Israelites in this week’s parashah. This week, we begin with the men of military age being counted. It appears to be a huge fighting force, for its time, an army of over 600,000 – 603,550, to be precise, as the Torah usefully is here.
Our rabbis suggest that number is so precise because it is the exact number of letters in the Torah, although how they know that, particularly before the advent of computers, is beyond me. If indeed they did count all the letters in the Torah, color me impressed. That’s a much more difficult feat of numbering than counting the fighting men in the tribes of Israel.
Although it turns out the number may not have been 603,550 after all.
There is some scholarly speculation that the Hebrew word elef, which now means 1,000, meant something like company or contingent in this ancient context, and that in fact Moses’s military census showed the Israelites had a fighting force of something on the order of 5,500, a much more realistic number for the time.
But whatever the numbers were, the count, the numbering, was of potential soldiers, because the Children of Israel were preparing for war. They were, in modern terms, preparing an invasion. Moses needed to know how many troops he had, so he took count.
There is an aphorism to the effect that not everything that can be counted counts.
But it is also true that we count what we value. We number what matters.
Indeed, the great French medieval commentator Rashi writes of Numbers 1:1 that God counts the Children of Israel out of love:
“Because they were dear to God, God counts them every now and then.”
It’s a lovely corrective to the contemporary insistence that we NOT be numbered – as Patrick McGoohan famously proclaimed in the 1960s TV series The Prisoner:
“I am not a number, I am a free man!”
And, to be fair, the fighting men being counted in our Torah portion were more than just numbers, even in their own time. The Torah preserves the names of the chiefs of the tribes who help Moses and Aaron with the census: Elizur son of Shedeur, Shelumiel son of Zurishaddai, Nahshon son of Amminidab, and so on.
And they, in turn, record the names of the men in their tribes aged 20 and up who can bear arms. There is, incidentally, no upper age limit on the men being counted for military service here, unlike the Levite priests who will be counted later in the portion, and only have to serve from age 30 to 50.
All those thousands or hundreds of thousands of names of men in the census have been lost, of course. We have only the numbers.
Numbers can tell a story on their own, but they are more powerful when they are linked with names.
The numbers 26 and 30, for example – the ages of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, the two Israeli Embassy employees gunned down in Washington, DC last week, as far as we know, simply for being associated with Israel.
“Sarah Milgrim’s parents didn’t know that Yaron Lischinsky was planning to propose to her until after the couple was killed by a gunman in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night,” – the opening line of the New York Times article memorializing them the day after they were murdered.
Or the number nine, for example – the number of children of Dr. Alaa al-Najjar killed in a bombing in Khan Younis last week, as far as we know, simply for being in Gaza.
Their names were Yahya, Rakan, Raslan, Gebran, Eve, Rival, Sayden, Luqman and Sidra. Sayden, the youngest, was six months old. The oldest, Yahya, was 12.
“It’s one of the most heartbreaking tragedies since the beginning of the conflict,” Mohammed Saqer, the head of nursing at Nasser hospital, said in the Guardian. “And it happened to a pediatrician who dedicated her life to saving children, only to have her own motherhood stolen in a moment of fire and deafening silence.”
In this week’s Torah portion, it is men who can serve as soldiers or as priests who are counted, who matter.
Today, when we ask: Who counts? We come up with a different answer.
These people – Sarah and Sayden, Yahya and Yaron – mattered. They counted.
We count what matters. We number what we value. We count what counts.
Richard Allen Greene, LBC rabbinic student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.