Tag Archives: counting people

Parashat Bemidbar:counting a community not calculating for the individual

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We are in the time of the counting the omer – the days between Pesach and Shavuot – which give an awareness of, and a prominence to the link between Freedom (Pesach) and Responsibility (Shavuot).

Counting is something that has long roots in Jewish tradition- we count days and weeks of the omer, we count the days of penitence between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we count the years for the shemittah year and we count the multiples of shemittah years for the Jubilee year. The scribe will count the letters written in a Torah scroll in order to check that there are none added and none removed accidentally.  We even count the days till brit and the “white days” in the menstrual cycle.  But counting people has always been a problem in Jewish tradition – it is forbidden to take a direct numbering of the people of Israel and plague was often the result for those who tried. The Talmud tells us “Rabbi Eleazar said: Whosoever counts Israel, transgresses a [biblical] prohibition, as it is said: “Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured” [Hosea]. R. Nachman b. Isaac said: He would transgress two prohibitions, for it is written: ‘Which cannot be measured or numbered’.

Counting people can be said to take away the uniqueness of the individual, turning them simply into a number, dehumanizing the person. At the same time one could argue that as every number is different, the person is stripped not so much of individuality as of community. Yet community power resides within numbers. The development of the three patriarchs to the seventy souls who went down with Jacob to Egypt, to the over six hundred thousand at Sinai show how the community, the peoplehood, grew.  We still understand a community to be the number we can count on the fingers of two hands – a minyan is ten people. Numbers bind us into community and they bind us to our roots. The traditional way of counting a minyan is to recite verse 9 of psalm 28 – the ten words of which being “hoshia et amecha uvarech et nachalatecha ur’eim venasseim ad ha’olam – Save Your people, and bless Your inheritance and tend them, and carry them for ever. Another traditional way is to say “not one, not two, not three etc”

The fear of counting people and thus separating them from the community and possibly from their own humanity has long roots in Judaism – only God is really allowed to count us, only God is seen as having the ability to count without discounting so to speak. Yet the need to understand the community and to be able to count people into the community continues.  And the way that bible recommends is that we ask for a contribution from people and each contribution is counted.

It isn’t so odd as it sounds. Effectively the half shekel poll tax in order to support the Temple was both a fundraising activity and a way of measuring the numerical strength of the community. But I particularly resonate to the requirement that asks of people that in order for their presence to be recognised, they should offer some basic support to the community, and with this support they will be counted in.

The idea of being in a community by virtue of what you are offering to that community – not life changing amounts of money per se as the half shekel was a deliberately small amount designed to be possible for everyone to give, but a contribution nevertheless is the expression of an ancient idea that you are part of the community if you choose to offer something of yourself to it, if you partake of it, if you participate within it. You are part of the community if the community can count on you.

Listening to the emotive and emotional arguments about the wider community issue on the agenda today – the arguments about whether we should remain in the European Union or leave it and forge a new path– we hear a lot of words but can discern very little useful information to help frame our thoughts. One recent analysis of the words used most by the two campaigns show that Remain repeatedly use the three words “Jobs”, “Trade”, Businesses”, while the Leave campaign use “controlled” “NHS” and “Money”. It seems clear that the argument for economic stability sits with the Remain campaign, the argument for autonomy with the Leave. But as we move from Pesach to Shavuot, from Freedom to Responsibility, and into the book of Bemidbar, of the transitional neither-here-nor-there liminal space of the wilderness on whose other side will be the border with the promised land I find myself more and more cross that the language being used is of self-interest and self-regard, of “what can I not give to the community” and “what can I get from the community”.

Where is the rhetoric of commonality or of shared aims and aspirations? Where is the language of supporting each other, of helping each other to make a better world?

All I hear is calculation, and I am reminded of a quotation attributed to the architect Daniel Libeskind that “Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it’s about experience, it’s about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.”

Life is best lived in relationship, in community with others, sometimes taking and sometimes giving but always associating with the other. The more I think of how we count a minyan – with the formula “not one, not two, not three”, the more I like the reminder that we are bound together, that while we may be individuals with our own self-interest and self-regard, what is most important about us is that we together can rise over our individualism in order to form something much bigger and much more nourishing for us all – we can  form community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shekalim: The imperative to never diminish people by reducing them to numbers on a list

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“The ETERNAL spoke to Moses, saying: ‘When you take the sum of the children of Israel, according to their number, then shall they give every man a ransom for his soul to God, when you number them; that there be no plague among them, when you numbers them. This they shall give, every one that passes among them that are numbered, half a shekel after the shekel of the sanctuary–the shekel is twenty gerahs–half a shekel for an offering to the ETERNAL. Every one that passes among them that are numbered, from twenty years old and upward, shall give the offering of the ETERNAL. The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less, than the half shekel, when they give the offering of the ETERNAL, to make atonement for your souls. And you shall take the atonement money from the children of Israel, and shall appoint it for the service of the tent of meeting, that it may be a memorial for the children of Israel before the ETERNAL to make atonement for your souls.'(Ex 30 11-16)”

Shabbat Shekalim comes around the beginning of the new month of Adar, in order to give a good month’s notice of the beginning of the month of Nisan, the month in which Pesach falls at the full moon. It is also read at this time because, according to tradition, the census of which it speaks was taken on the first of Nisan, so the reading is also acting of a reminder of that census and its purpose. The passage reminds us of the census taken in the wilderness through the donation of a half shekel coin, given not apparently only for the purpose of counting people, but also as a kind of sacrifice to offer atonement for sin, and also to provide for the maintenance of the Tent of Meeting – the forerunner to Temple and Synagogue as the space which reminds the people that God is among them. On Shabbat Shekalim, we also read a haftarah portion from 2 Kings which also makes reference to the census money and the use of it for Temple maintenance.

It is a complex text raising a lot of questions. What is the atonement being offered? What plague is being avoided? What could possibly be the difficulty with a census, a direct count of the military age men? There seems to be an ancient taboo against counting people which operates still today. By tradition one never counts people – when checking that there are ten people for a minyan a verse from the psalms is read “Hoshia et amekha, u’varekh et nahalatekha, ur’em v’nas’em ad ha’olam” [Save Your nation and bless Your inheritance, tend to them and raise them up, forever – Psalm 28:9]. It has ten words, each used to check off the people until it is clear that there are ten or over.

So why don’t we count people? Rashi suggests that numbering people means we don’t see their full humanity, and in some way we diminish them. He brings to his argument the ancient text of the Hebrew bible translated by Onkelos into Aramaic – the word for census becomes ‘taking’ – in some way by numbering people we take from them something essential. So he tells us we should never do a head count, but instead take from each of them a token, and then count those tokens. If we do not, we risk a plague coming upon us, as happened when David conducted a census. The Talmud also asks and answers our question – but differently:

“Why are people not counted directly? … Rabbi Isaac says ‘It is forbidden to count Israel, even for the performance of a mitzvah.’ … “The Talmudic discussion focuses on the verse: “The number of B’nei Yisrael will be like the sands of the sea which cannot be measured or counted …” (Hosea 2:1). In other words it is a sort of denial of faith, that the promise given to Abraham that his descendants would be beyond counting would somehow be compromised by the act of counting.

I am not sure that either of these responses gives us the authoritative reason for why counting people is so viscerally wrong. But there is something very powerful in the refusal to see people in terms of numbers. And interesting too that in the act of finding out how many men of military age are available in the community – for that must be the primary purpose of this counting – other things are woven in. Each person who is eligible gives half a shekel, something we are reminded is based on a known weight of silver equal to twenty gerahs. So each person gives the equivalent of ten gerahs. This half shekel coin must have been one of the smallest – but possibly not THE smallest – coin, something that was within everyone’s reach to donate. But add to that is the instruction – both rich and poor will contribute the same amount, neither more nor less. This reminds us that both rich and poor are equally valued in the eyes of God. The contribution of each one is of equal importance. So in the act of assessing capacity for military strength, everyone is expected to give something, and relative wealth is made irrelevant – everyone contributes the same. The fact that it is coins and not people being counted for this is also a salutary lesson – on the one hand there is something that seems to be a little coldly dispassionate about counting the silver tokens rather than the human beings, but at the same time the humanity of the individuals is being preserved – only the contribution they give is being counted. And then the piece de resistance – the silver tokens that are given are to be used not for war, not in any way for aggrandizing the powerful or for claiming the territory of others – all the contributions are used to maintain the Tent of Meeting – in effect they are the synagogue subscriptions. It is no accident that many synagogues finish their financial years at this time – the Torah reading reminds everyone of the need to give, to contribute to the well-being of the community. Without such offerings no synagogue or Jewish institution would survive.

The passage we read as maftir for Shabbat Shekalim is a well known one with clear parallels in today’s practice. The need to be able to call together a force to defend the people and the land; the need for the humanity of that force to be defended too so that the soldiers do not lose their essential souls in the fighting they do is vital, and there is much to be said about how that particular lesson is not being applied well in the current situation in Israel – just look at the website of Breaking the Silence, the testimony of Israeli soldiers, to see how values and humanity can be eroded. The imperative to never diminish people by reducing them to numbers on a list is one to which our own recent history bears painful testimony. But something else struck me powerfully this year when reading the piece. The half-ness of the shekel and the fact that a half shekel is ten gerahs.

Why a half shekel? One response is that this is a coin within reach of everyone, something that is not too big a sacrifice to give but not so small as to be insignificant. That may well be true, there is no clear economic scale for us to check it against but it has a sort of inherent likelihood. But think a little more and other values emerge. A half shekel is not complete – it requires another half to complete it. What we are saying by giving this ‘half’ is that we are making a contribution, but on its own it is not powerful enough – we need to be part of a community in order to play out our values successfully.

To be part of a community, we have first to count ourselves, to give something that can itself be noted and counted. The half shekel that we give demonstrates that we need someone else in the community to fulfill us and make us whole, to partner us and complete us. Judaism teaches that life is not to be lived as an ascetic, removing ourselves from the pleasures of people – life is to be lived in community – so public prayer for example requires a minyan – hence the need to count the people to ensure ten are present. Community is an essential tool in tikkun olam, in repairing the world. It is certainly true that one person alone can make a difference, but working together with others creates a whole world of other possibilities. We all need other people to fulfill us and the offer of a half shekel not only allows ourselves into the community, it invites others to be our partner.