 | The fourth book of Torah (Numbers) opens with our desert-wandering ancestors starting their 14th month walking free from Egypt. They begin by taking a census of the Children of Israel, of each separate tribe, and of subsets of the Tribe of Levi dedicated to sacred service. Thousands of years later, Auschwitz survivors bore numbered tattoos on their forearms, a gruesome testament to the horror of treating people as ledger entries. What does it mean to "count" in Jewish life? |
By Rabbi David Evan Markus
Parashat Bamidbar 5785 (2025)
Who counts? You count.
In Jewish spiritual life – and therefore also in community life – each person matters vitally and utterly. Each and every person bears a unique image of the sacred; to save a single person is to save the whole world (B.T. Sanhedrin 37a).
It follows that nobody is extraneous. To Zohar, everyone and everything has some worthy purpose (Zohar 1.23a). To Nachman of Breslov, “The day you were born is the day God decided that the world could not exist without you (ּהַיּוֹם בּוֹ נוֹלֶדֶת הוּא הַיּוֹם בּוֹ הִחְלִיט הַקב''ה שֶׁהָעוֹלָם אֵינוֹ יָכוֹל לְהִתְּקַיֵם בִּלְעָדֶיךָ). Yes, you.
So it is profoundly important, and complex, that this week's Torah portion – the opening of the Book of Numbers – opens with a census of the Children of Israel. The people count the whole by counting each of the 12 tribes, and each subgroup of the Tribe of Levi (the Levites) dedicated to sacred service.
How did our ancestors "count"? Importantly, they didn't actually count people. Rather, each person gave a coin, and they counted the coins. To count people directly would reduce them to figures in a ledger, people are too important for that.
In fact, even Torah's Hebrew for "take a census" doesn't quite say that. Torah doesn't even say "count." Rather, Torah's Hebrew is שְׂא֗וּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ֙ כָּל־עֲדַ֣ת בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל / "Lift the head[s] of all the community of the Children of Israel" (Numbers 1:2).
Lift the head. Lift each head. Because each person counts.
Torah's calling was incomplete in her day. Torah didn't "count" women, or man-boys under 20 (Numbers 1:20): the purpose of the first census was military, and back then Israelite youth and women didn't battle. (Today, all Israelis including women join the Israeli Defense Forces after high school.) Like all societies, Jewish life is still making our way toward complete equality and belonging for all.
Meanwhile, sometimes Jewish community life still gauges success "by the numbers" in ways that turn people into ledger figures. My clergy colleagues and students sometimes lament to me when the "success" of programs and events titrates to how many tushies were in the seats, rather than the depth and continuity of impact.
The extreme of "counting" that way was the inhumanly cruel Nazi efficiency of recording and counting each Auschwitz inmate's number on a forearm. Even more than this week's Torah portion's teaching to count things rather than people, the image of Auschwitz tattoos burned into Jewish consciousness forever bans us from counting people as impersonal math figures. Even in "counting" a minyan, we use the 10 words of Psalms 28:9 to avoid counting people:
Parashat Bamidbar 5785 (2025)
Who counts? You count.
In Jewish spiritual life – and therefore also in community life – each person matters vitally and utterly. Each and every person bears a unique image of the sacred; to save a single person is to save the whole world (B.T. Sanhedrin 37a).
It follows that nobody is extraneous. To Zohar, everyone and everything has some worthy purpose (Zohar 1.23a). To Nachman of Breslov, “The day you were born is the day God decided that the world could not exist without you (ּהַיּוֹם בּוֹ נוֹלֶדֶת הוּא הַיּוֹם בּוֹ הִחְלִיט הַקב''ה שֶׁהָעוֹלָם אֵינוֹ יָכוֹל לְהִתְּקַיֵם בִּלְעָדֶיךָ). Yes, you.
So it is profoundly important, and complex, that this week's Torah portion – the opening of the Book of Numbers – opens with a census of the Children of Israel. The people count the whole by counting each of the 12 tribes, and each subgroup of the Tribe of Levi (the Levites) dedicated to sacred service.
How did our ancestors "count"? Importantly, they didn't actually count people. Rather, each person gave a coin, and they counted the coins. To count people directly would reduce them to figures in a ledger, people are too important for that.
In fact, even Torah's Hebrew for "take a census" doesn't quite say that. Torah doesn't even say "count." Rather, Torah's Hebrew is שְׂא֗וּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ֙ כָּל־עֲדַ֣ת בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל / "Lift the head[s] of all the community of the Children of Israel" (Numbers 1:2).
Lift the head. Lift each head. Because each person counts.
Torah's calling was incomplete in her day. Torah didn't "count" women, or man-boys under 20 (Numbers 1:20): the purpose of the first census was military, and back then Israelite youth and women didn't battle. (Today, all Israelis including women join the Israeli Defense Forces after high school.) Like all societies, Jewish life is still making our way toward complete equality and belonging for all.
Meanwhile, sometimes Jewish community life still gauges success "by the numbers" in ways that turn people into ledger figures. My clergy colleagues and students sometimes lament to me when the "success" of programs and events titrates to how many tushies were in the seats, rather than the depth and continuity of impact.
The extreme of "counting" that way was the inhumanly cruel Nazi efficiency of recording and counting each Auschwitz inmate's number on a forearm. Even more than this week's Torah portion's teaching to count things rather than people, the image of Auschwitz tattoos burned into Jewish consciousness forever bans us from counting people as impersonal math figures. Even in "counting" a minyan, we use the 10 words of Psalms 28:9 to avoid counting people:
| הוֹשִׁיעָה אֶת־עַמֶּךָ וּבָרֵךְ אֶת־נַחֲלָתֶךָ וּֽרְעֵם וְנַשְּׂאֵם עַד־הָעוֹלָם׃ | Save Your people and bless Your heritage: pasture and lift them forever. |
Lift. Lift each head. Each person counts, and each person is priceless.
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