Parashat Naso 5762 Numbers 4:21 - 7:89
Shabbat Shalom-
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Seven days after Pentecost (Shavuot=weeks)=50 days from Passover we read a story about counting the Israelites leaving Egypt. The root for number, SFR, in modern Hebrew has many meanings including a number, to number, a scribe, a book, a library, a story, or telling a story. These two distinct roots of counting and recounting have their origins in how the ancient Hebrews treated numbers. Counting communicates care or concern. If we have 30 sheep and count 29, we will be concerned for one (viz. I Samuel 25:29). Perhaps the scribe/SoFeR was a counter of letters, so scrupulous in counting the letters of scriptures, that a counter became the word for scribe. A parent doesn't remember how many children he/she has out of a sense of statistics, but of love, for each one is special.*
Counting can also become a sign of religious torpor. When religion becomes a mere counting of blessings, sins, and inches, it becomes stale. Abraham Joshua Heschel writes in his introduction to God in Search of Man, p.3 "Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.... [W]hen religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion-- its message becomes meaningless."**
If we reduce religion to a mere ritual without spirit, it is a dead thing. We can pray three times a day, but prayer must be with God, oneself, or ones community-- not fulfilling ones obligation to say certain words in a certain order at certain times. Religion is a structure for spiritual and communal fulfillment, not a calculus of actions and creeds. Yet, Maimonides writes that fixed prayer was established to help people pray (Laws of Prayer 1:1-10[8]). So what of counting? Do we advocate randomness and arbitrariness?
To distill these various ideas, we would have to say that counting must be done in moderation. If we wait for a spiritual moment to pray, when will we pray? There is a story of a secular Israeli soldier wounded and dying in one of Israel's many wars of self-defense. He calls a rabbi and tells him he wants to pray but he doesn't know the words. Could the rabbi please read some psalms with him and say some prayers? Practice with prayer prepares you for the moment when you need it. But though we might maintain the same structure, we are required to make changes to keep our spirits alive as we read the old words (M Ber. 4:4, Avot 2:16[13]). Repetition of a lesson first strengthens the lesson in one's mind, then begins to dull it with monotony. It is then that the spice of changes keep the lesson alive, often by applying it to new situations.
Counting can also tell a story. In our reading, though the number of people counted in the exodus is contested (see Olam HaTanakh below***), it is commonly understood that Bible uses the numbers to show God's concern for His people, Israel. The counting can be a snapshot of the people in their history, a marker of its growth and journey.
Numbering a people does not give them a higher status. It only gives us a sense of magnitude. "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic, " says Stalin. Large numbers of people can blind us to the individuals in the crowd. Perhaps this is meaning of the blessing upon seeing a large crowd "Blessed are you Lord, our God Ruler of the World, sage of secrets".
Things exist even if they are not counted, remembered, or retold. Things exist even if they are not immediately present. Babies forget you are there when you cover your face, but you are there. An inscription left by a Holocaust victim reads "I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I do not feel it. I believe in God even if he is silent." The multiple meanings of SFR, counting through telling, remind us that perception is so much a sense of what is immediately around us. Without taking the time to count, we may become slowly oblivious to the larger world around us. Without taking the time to reinvent the repeated lesson, we may forget it. Without retelling the stories of our people, how can they dwell in our souls?
Knowing your numbers might mean to know your limits and weaknesses, but it also gives you a sense of history, community, and continuity.
Have a caring week!
Benjamin Fleischer
* In Biblical times, counting people (men) was often seen as a bad omen, a sign of impending war and thus death and destruction. Counting people was also a way of dividing up the land equitably. Though both these cases occur in the Torah, they do not detract from the general thrust of this paper.
**Assorted Abraham Joshua Heschel Quotes:
http://www.dap.nl/God%20Brieven%20van/Heschel.html
It is customary to blame secular science and antireligious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes a heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion-its message becomes meaningless. p.3 God in Search of Man
---
***Olam HaTanakh on Numbers (Translated by Benjamin Fleischer, in an attempt to capture the nuances of the Hebrew)
"Six Hundreds Thousand ('eLeF) and Thirty Thousands ('aLaFiYM) and Five Hundreds and Fifty" (Num 1:46)
This number is identical to the number that was received in the previous accounting, which was carried out in the first year that Am Yisrael (People of Israel) was in the wilderness (Ex 38:26). Another accounting, that was carried out in the fortieth year, arrived sum total of the accounted to six hundreds and one thousand and seven hundreds and thirty souls [601,730] (Num 26:51). These numbers fit other traditions regarding the number of mature males that left Egypt (compare Ex 12:37, Num. 11:21). They obligate us to assume that there was a population of more than two million souls, which sustained itself during forty years in the Sinai peninsula. This great number creates a serious difficulty. It doesn't sit well with the other demographic conditions of early Israel. For example, in Deborah's song, that was written cerca one hundred years after the wandering in the wilderness, we find, that six tribes could draft only forty thousand warriors [40,000], while those tribes numbed two hundred seventy three thousand men [273,000] in the accounting in the Numbers 1 and three hundred and one thousand [301,000] in the census in Numbers 26. Moreover, these numbers don't stand on one leg with other numbers taken from that very accounting. For example, regarding the number twenty and two thousand and two hundred seventy and three [22,273] first-born males (Num 3:40-43), if we set out from the assumption that the number of females in the population was identical to the number of males, then only one in thirteen females [1 in 13] over the age of twenty were mothers of children.
The fact that the word 'eLeF means both ancestral house and also the number thousand, brings a suggested solution to the problem: If 'eLeF can be linked to the military strength of the ancestral house, it is possible the "hundreds" could be linked to the number of males that is possible to draft. Therefore, the tribe of Reuben, that counted, as it were, forty and six 'eLeF and five hundred men [46,500 men], includes practically forty and six units [46 units], that the sum of their men is five hundred [500 people] (1,21). Every unit includes on average ten to eleven men. Until the time of the monarchy this unit grew to over a thousand men, and its number ['eLeF] became "fixed" [at 1,000]. The principal difficulty with this theory is, that in the earlier writings, 'eLeF is the name of an entire ancestral house, and not the warring strength alone (see, for example, I Samuel 23:23, Micah 5:1). Another theory opines that, 'eLeF is a naming for any large number, and that "Six Hundreds" is the naming for a basic army unit. According to this theory, the number six hundred 'eLeF means a large number of army units (every one of six hundreds men). However, this theory doesn't stand on one leg with the sums of tribal numbers in the accounting and also with the number of draftees in early Israel: the two of them aren't divided into six hundreds (for example, Jud. 20:16). p.19-10
...However, all these solutions don't hold satisfactorily to the scriptures, and many researchers posit that the source of the accounting in our chapter [26] served as a list of tribes in Israel by their families, that became only in a later working more of a listing of the accounting [i.e. that the numbers are from a later period]. p156
[I add, not to mention that the 70 families must have multiplied to this 600,000 men over three generations of slavery, or =Jacob (147 yrs., 17 in Egypt), Levi (137 yrs, maybe 100 in Egypt), Kehat (133 yrs.), Amram (137 yrs.), Moses (120 yrs., 80 in Egypt) (I Chron 5:27-29, Ex 6:17-20, Gen 47:28, Num 26:57-59) for a total of maybe 450 years if they had their children at the end of their lives, which they would have to do if the slavery was supposed to last either 400 (Gen 15:13) or 430 (Ex 12:40-41) years at an absurd growth rate of some thirty-fold per tribe per generation, I estimate.]
You are also welcome to send comments and suggestions to bfleischer@nyc.rr.com
"a little philosophy inclineth men to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth man's mind about to God." -Bacon