Parashat Bemidbar I: How Can People Be Counted?

This week we begin reading a new book of the Torah, the book of Numbers, so-called because it begins with numbers, with a detailed census of the people. Now the counting of people is generally considered a dangerous affair by the Torah. In Exodus the direct counting of people is shunned in favor of the use of a half-shekel coin representative for each individual (Ex 30:11-16). This method of counting is said to avoid “ a plague,” and indeed, later in history, in the time of David, a plague did come about as a result of a census (see 2 Samuel 24). Today, because of these concerns about counting, there is a tradition of not counting people directly, but through the use of a special verse exactly 10 words long, or by saying “not-1, not-2.”

Why is counting people considered so dangerous? To count people as part of a group endangers their divinely given uniqueness, implies that they are only cogs in a wheel, animals to be branded, coins to be accumulated. The Nazis’ degrading use of numbers on their victims’ arms comes to mind. The Torah is insistent that each person is unique and irreplaceable, for each person carries within her a piece of the divine. As the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:5) says: “When a human being makes a number of coins out of one stamp, they are all alike; but the King of all Kings, the Holy One blessed be He stamped every person with the stamp of Adam, and not one is like any other.”

The Numbers census is allowable partly because it seems to have avoided this pitfall. Num 1:2 and 1:18 say the counting happened “listing the names,” and “head by head.” Nachmanides (on 1:45) interprets this phrase to mean that God insisted that they be counted “with honor and greatness for each and every one,” having every single person be brought out by name, rather than simply asking the head of each household for a tally.

But it’s not just that the Numbers census avoided this danger of erasing the individual. It’s also that the census was performed for an appropriate purpose. There is a danger to counting. But there is also a danger to not counting, the danger that the individual remains alone, simply an individual. That is not the Torah’s goal. Part of the purpose of the census in Numbers was to physically arrange the camp, to give each tribe its place within the larger group, these to the north, these to the south, etc. . . They were to camp ish al diglo, each person with his flag, each at his special station, playing his unique role as part of a whole.