Even in Biblical times, Jews didn’t count the way you would expect. The book of Bamidbar or Numbers begins with a census, not of all the people but only men of military age, each according to their family and tribe. There were 603,550 people that fell into that category. This leaves us with absolutely no understanding of how many Israelites there actually were supposed to be – one million, two million, it’s anyone’s guess.
Amazingly, the way synagogues count membership figures is similarly convoluted. We do it by the number of families, an ambiguous standard that does not tell you how many people are in your community. So why the ruse?
There is a Jewish superstition against counting people altogether. By assigning a number to a human being, we are reducing them to a statistic. Whether in Biblical times or today, we should see one another “in the image of God,” unique, beautiful, and impossible to fully count.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex