Reduced to Numbers … Do We Count?

Every week, the Union for Reform Judaism publishes a commentary on the weekly Torah portion on their website. We are excited to announce that this summer, Rabbi Skloot will be writing the URJ’s d’var Torah for the Book of Numbers, which we will share with you every Friday, here, on this blog. Shabbat shalom!

B’midbar, “In the Wilderness” (Numbers 1:1-4:20).

Were they people? Not to the Principal. Not even employees? They were more like digits, widgets, sprockets, more cogs on the command chain. (Joshua Cohen, The Book of Numbers, Oxford, 2014, p. 1.87)

Incredulous. That’s how I felt, after requesting and then learning my Uber passenger rating. You see, drivers get to rate and rank you too.

“4.8! That’s it?” I thought. “I’ve never been impolite or unfriendly. I never cancel a request after submitting one. What reason could there be for denying me a full five stars?”

Once again, here was one small example of the many ways each of us is reduced to numbers as we go about our post-modern lives.

“Please enter your account number, followed by the pound sign.”

The world knows us by our SSNs and PINs. Job performance and health are quantified and compared. We rank and rate universities, restaurants, wine, cars, and even dates.

As the novelist Joshua Cohen writes in his devastating send-up of post-modern life, The Book of Numbers, “Point is, we’re all made differently of the same ones and zeros…” (ibid., p. 1.99).

It goes without saying that qualification makes large amounts of data easier to categorize and understand. But it also has the effect of obscuring beauty, individuality, and difference. We have only to think of the Nazis’ practice of tattooing numbers on our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents and we shudder with horror.

Perhaps, the dehumanizing quality of quantification is the reason Jews have generally frowned on counting people. I remember my Orthodox Hebrew school teacher counting our class by whispering, “Not one, not two . . . ” In fact, this concept goes back to the Babylonian Talmud where Rabbi Isaac taught, “It’s prohibited to count the Jewish people, even in order to do a mitzvah” (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 22b).

Then again, in this week’s Torah reading, Parashat B’midbar, God instructs Moses to, “Take a census of the whole Israelite community by their clan, by their ancestral houses, according to the number of names of every male, head by head” (Numbers 1:2). The parashah goes on to count and compare the male populations of the various Israelite tribes.

Nachmanides, in his commentary on this parashah (see Numbers 1:18), suggests that Moses never, in fact, counted the people directly. Rather, every Israelite male came before the tribal chiefs with a shekel and declared his name and tribal affiliation. The chiefs grouped the shekels by tribe and then counted them, yielding an accurate census of each tribe. Perhaps. But this interpretation rings apologetic.

More interesting, however, is Rashi’s commentary on this parashah. Rashi turns the whole idea of taking a census on its head. For him, this isn’t an act of bureaucratic expediency. Rather, he writes, “Out of God’s love for them, he counted them often” (see Rashi on Numbers 1:1). For Rashi, counting doesn’t dehumanize or obscure, it’s an expression of love and care — one manifestation of God’s protection and devotion to God’s precious treasures.

We don’t normally experience counting in this way. More often than not, to be counted is to feel, as Cohen writes, “more like digits, widgets, sprockets, more cogs on the command chain” — robbed of our identities. Yet, Rashi’s interpretation of our parashah, reminds us what we all know deep down: We are much more than the numbers assigned to us. We are much more than ones and zeroes and Uber rankings. We are all precious treasures, worthy of love and affection.

We count.

This commentary originally appeared on ReformJudaism.org.

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