Parashat Bemidbar: On Love and Counting

Sometimes in the face of all the numbers, all the daily details and words and arrangements, we lose sight of what underlies it all – the relationships, the connections, the love. That’s why I find it so beautiful that at the beginning of a parsha filled with such numbers and details (the census, the names of the leaders and the details of the encampment formation), Rashi makes the following comment: Mitokh Hibatan lefanav moneh otam kol sha’ah. “Out of God’s love for them, He counts them all the time.” Don’t forget, amidst all of life’s details, that what is really driving it all is simply love. That is what is at the core, at the core of the whole Torah, and at the core of our lives: love.

It is a love very much engaged and expressed in the concrete world we live in – expressed in the numbers and arrangements needed to be made to accommodate hundreds of thousands of people wandering through the desert. Love is not some abstract concept, a honeymoon, a romantic evening, but the daily care we offer one another – the sandwiches packed, the carpool arrangements made, the noses wiped.

So yes – it needs to be concrete and detail-oriented– like the numbers of this week’s parsha. But it also feels important every once in a while to remind ourselves of the backdrop of love, to stop amidst the hurry and harried dailiness to ask: What am I hurrying for? What am I working so hard for? To remind ourselves that these numbers are not an end in and of themselves, that our striving to produce and have outcomes and measurables, that ultimately these are not the point –they are all in service of relationships, of connections – to one another, to God, to the community, to the world.

I think of what Ms. Crom, the former first grade General Studies teacher at HACD, once did for one of my children. It was the first spelling test of the year, the first test in my child’s school career, and as it was going on, with all the children sitting and writing their words, he started to cry. I don’t remember exactly what precipitated it – he had forgotten to skip lines between words or not numbered them or his pencil broke. Some such thing that made him cry. What Ms. Crom did has stuck with me. She stopped the class, stopped the test, and said: We all need to stop and take care of this child right now.

That’s what I mean – remembering that the whole point of learning to spell in the first place is communication and connection, that human beings and human relations must stand at the center. The letters need to be learned, the people counted, but all in the context of love and connection.

Each week of the Omer is dedicated to a different one of the Kabbalistic sephirot, or aspects of God’s being in the world, and each week, there is an opportunity to focus on working on the corresponding trait in ourselves. This week, the sixth week, is the week of Yesod, “Foundation,” which is understood as connectedness or relationship. This is the week to think about how our connections lie at the core, are indeed the foundation for our lives and for the world, to notice and remind ourselves that all these numbers, all the details of our busy lives, are in service of a deep love and connectedness.