Walking through Jerusalem in my second year of rabbinical school, I was accosted by a very strange older man, whispering to me in Hebrew. “Minyan,” he said, a few times in quick staccato fashion. It was around four in the afternoon, and I had just finished teaching a class at the Liberal Yeshivah housed at the Hebrew Union College campus, only a shade’s throw from the Old City, weary, ready to return to my apartment several miles away in Baka. But, something in the man’s nervous inflection clued me into what exactly he was asking of me. I followed him into a small unmarked door, where a small group of anxious men awaited a full quorum. I was being called into be their tenth member.
Numbers matter in Judaism, they determine which prayers can be said at what times and how we see ourselves in the larger world. But, as we find out in the first few verses of this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tisa, the act of actually counting is forbidden.
As the text tells us in Exodus 30:12: “When you take a census of the Israelite people according to their enrollment, each shall pay Adonai a ransom on being enrolled, that no plague may come upon them.” What does Torah mean by a ransom and a plague? Rashi and other commentators point to a section at the very end of the second Book of Samuel where David is admonished for taking an unauthorized census of the People of Israel. ”I have sinned grievously in what I have done. Please Adonai remit the guilt of Your servant, for I have acted foolishly,” the mighty king begs God (II Samuel 24:10).
Counting, apparently, devalues life, turning people from human beings into statistics. Here in the pandemic we can understand this. Five hundred thousand deaths can be harder to relate to than an individual death. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel, they demonstrate the loss of a million children by taking you through a hall where an individual candle is projected by mirrors everywhere you look. In traditional circles, the method of counting takes the form of words in Biblical verses. As long as actual numbers are not used, we avoid the wrath of God. Regardless of our methodology, we should heed our ancestors’ advice and not allow counting one another to devalue any individual life.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex