To count is to care. The medieval commentators understood this. They noted that God counts Israel repeatedly, not out of forgetfulness, but out of love. Just as one counts prized possessions to ensure their safety, so too does God count the people. In this parashah, the census occurs in the second month of the second year after the Exodus. The Tabernacle has just been completed. The nation is being prepared to journey. But before the people can move, they must be numbered. Identity and presence are confirmed through number.

The act of counting in Bemidbar is not simply an exercise in data gathering. It is a ritual. The Mishnah (Menahot 10:3) teaches that “the omer offering [on the second day of Passover] permits the new grain for consumption” (מִשֶּׁקֵּרֵב עֹמֶר הֻתְרָה חָדָשׁ בַּמִּדְרָש) and it sets into motion the ritual of sefirat ha-omer, the counting of the days between Pesah and Shavuot. Day by day, we make our way from liberation to revelation. Counting marks the movement from chaos to covenant.

So too with the bikkurim—the first fruits. These were brought to the Temple specifically on Shavuot, as instructed in Deuteronomy 26 and Leviticus 23:17, which refers to the “day of first fruits” (יוֹם הַבִּכּוּרִים). Shavuot thus marks not only the giving of Torah, but also the moment when the agricultural firsts of the land were dedicated to God. Mishnah Bikkurim chapter 3 describes how the farmer, upon seeing the first fig or pomegranate ripen in the field, ties a reed around it and declares, “This is bikkurim” (הֲרֵי אֵלּוּ בִּכּוּרִים). A simple act of noticing becomes a moment of sanctification. It is an act that unites the personal and the communal, the agricultural and the spiritual. When the time comes, the farmer brings those fruits to Jerusalem, with song, procession, and thanksgiving.

Both the omer count and the bikkurim involve numbers, but they also involve narrative. They mark transitions: from slavery to freedom, from wilderness to Torah, from potential to fulfillment. They are structured rituals of awareness. Counting days or tying a reed around a fruit are not ends in themselves. They are practices of mindfulness, of spiritual attention.

This is not a modern overlay. The Torah itself associates the wilderness, the midbar, with the condition for revelation. In the midrashic imagination, God chose to give the Torah in a place that belonged to no tribe, no nation. The midbar is ownerless. To enter it, to be counted in it, is to renounce claim and embrace vulnerability.

Ritual counting, then, is a paradox. It affirms the value of each individual (“head by head”—לְגֻלְגְּלֹתָם) while simultaneously pulling the individual into a greater whole. The medieval commentators saw this as well. When the Levites are counted separately, it is not to marginalize them but to elevate them—to mark their distinct role in the sacred center. Counting, in this view, is not flattening but differentiating.

And yet, the Torah also warns against certain kinds of counting. Later, King David will count the people without proper cause or offering, and a plague ensues. The Talmud (Berakhot 55a) teaches that blessing does not dwell on that which is measured or counted or weighed, but only on that which is hidden from the eye: אֵין הַבְּרָכָה מְצוּיָה אֶלָּא בְּדָבָר הַסָּמוּי מִן הָעַיִן.

Why count at all? The answer lies in the intent. In Bemidbar, the counting is commanded by God, mediated by Moses and Aaron, and connected to the building of a holy community. It is not an assertion of control, but an invitation to responsibility. Each name is recorded not for its statistical value, but for its sacred role.

Consider the Levites. They are counted not from age 20 like the rest of the tribes, but from age one month (Num. 3:15; פְּקֹד אֶת־בְּנֵי לֵוִי . . .  מִבֶּן חֹדֶשׁ וָמָעְלָה), and again from ages 30 to 50 for those performing the labor (Num. 4:3; מִבֶּן שְׁלֹשִׁים שָׁנָה וָמַעְלָה). These multiple censuses show that even within the sacred, there are layers of function, readiness, and service. Counting here is attuned to context and capacity.

The Mishnah (Menahot 10:5) notes:

מִשֶּׁחָרַב בֵּית הַמִּקְדָּשׁ… סוֹפְרִין אֶת הַיָּמִים.

“From the day the Temple was destroyed, no longer do we bring the omer, but we still count the days.”

Ritual can outlive structure. The frame remains even when the content shifts. Our counting preserves the aspiration.

In the same way, Mishnah Bikkurim 3 describes how groups of pilgrims would ascend to Jerusalem, flute players leading the way, chanting Psalms. Each step of the journey was part of the offering. The counting, the tying, the walking, the declaring—it was all a kind of liturgy. Notably, the Mishnah gives detailed accounts of both the omer count and the bikkurim rituals. These descriptive layers are not merely instructional; they are themselves a form of counting. The Hebrew root ס.פ.ר. (s-f-r) carries this dual meaning: it signifies both counting (as in סְפִירָה, sefirah) and telling or narrating (as in סִפֵּר, sipper). A number is not only a quantity, but a story. To count is to name, to recall, to witness. The linguistic richness deepens when we recall that in Arabic, the cognate root s-f-r means “to travel” or “to journey.” Thus, counting, telling, and traveling are bound together by language. Every sefirah is both a tally and a tale. And each step from Egypt to Sinai—whether marked by grain, fruit, or word—is a passage worth retelling.

Today, our own spiritual lives can feel unmeasurable. We rarely mark progress in clear increments. But Jewish ritual, especially in this season, offers tools to make time visible and sacred. Counting the omer. Marking the first fruit. Reading Bemidbar.

Counting is not sterile. It is intimate. When the Torah opens with a census, it is opening with a question: Will you see yourself in the count? Will you make yourself count? Will you step forward, name by name, heart by heart?

The wilderness is not a void. It is a vessel. And counting is the practice that fills it. It makes room for memory, expectation, and commitment. As we stand between Egypt and Sinai, between Bemidbar and Shavuot, we count not only days but possibilities.

May we learn to count in this way—not to limit, but to lift. Not to calculate, but to consecrate. And may the act of counting lead us, once again, to the place where we heard a voice that spoke from fire, saying: “You are counted. You matter. You belong.”—אַתָּה נִמְנֶה. יֵשׁ לְךָ עֵרֶךְ. אַתָּה שַׁיָּךְ.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l). 

Moshe, too, after killing the Egyptian and prior to his divine call to leadership, retreats to the wilderness, a period of withdrawal into a space outside the habitation of society. It was only in that space, R. Bahya ben Asher suggests, far from the yishuv (dwelling place) of the population, that Moshe could reenact the prophetic encounter of his ancestors, a withdrawal for the sake of spiritual and moral elevation (commentary to ). Like Moshe the solitary shepherd, the people of Israel must undergo a spiritual transformation, a process of purification—from the impure state of idolatry to the refined condition necessary to enter the holy land. This purification is represented by the desolate nature of the wilderness—a vast emptiness that facilitates a breakthrough in mind and soul. As Kathleen Norris has written, evoking life on the Great Plains of Dakota as a spiritual practice:

Here the eye learns to appreciate slight variations, the possibilities inherent in emptiness. It sees that the emptiness is full of small things… A person is forced inward by the spareness of what is outward and visible in all this land and sky… Maybe seeing the Plains is like seeing an icon: what seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state (Dakota, pp. 156-7).

The experience of what appears to be emptiness is an opening into another state of spiritual perception, an opening of the heart into the concealed indwelling of divine holiness. The sublime interior of the human soul is revealed in that moment of mystery and grandeur before the vastness of the All.

Likewise, R. Bahya asks, restating an earlier midrashic teaching (Tanhuma, 6; ): why does the Torah emphasize God’s speech to Moshe in the wilderness of Sinai (בְּמִדְבַּר סִינַי)? It was to teach that “a person does not attain the Torah until they have made themselves empty and abandoned like the wilderness” (אין אדם קונה התורה עד שיעשה עצמו הפקר כמדבר) [commentaryto ]. To receive the revelation of Torah—or perhaps a bit less grandly, to let Torah take root in one’s heart—a person must first make themselves into a midbar, an inner empty wilderness that is cleared of all the weeds and brush that obstruct true perception and feeling. A wilderness that returns to the first purity of nature.

Just as divine revelation and the Torah arise from the physical space of wilderness, of midbar—at the burning bush and then at Mount Sinai—a heart infused with divine Torah arises through a person’s mindful cultivation of their own interior wilderness. One should seek to attain the level of hefker—of feeling unbound by the pride and egoism of ownership, of being unattached to materialism. In hefker consciousness, we train our spiritual sight to see the Divine Presence that dwells beneath the surface, beneath the many golden calves of our obsessions, possessions, and wayward priorities. This is a radical reinvention of the concept of hefker, a neutral halakhic category of abandonment and ownerlessness (e.g. ).

In this transformed reading, the midbar may be said to embody a pure state of emptiness—an inner cleansing that allows us to go deeper into the spiritual path. Becoming hefker kemidbar is a process of letting go of our imprisonment in materiality, in ephemeral and finite desires—to be liberated into the vastness of an inner wilderness. As R. Nahman of Bratzlav taught (Likutei Moharan I:52), the most profound opening of the heart to God takes place in the physical space of darkness and wilderness, the frightening ground of loneliness and alienation. It is in hitbodedut (solitude) that we are able to empty our minds and hearts of society’s overwhelming drumbeat, where the ultimate bitul hayeish (erasure of superficial, mundane consciousness) becomes possible, and we are truly opened in all of our vulnerability before Divinity. In that place of midbar, we are able to break open the heart in ways we didn’t know were possible, to cry out to God from a place of the deepest emotional honesty. The midbar is an inner place of psyche as much as it is a terrestrial location.

But it washefker kemidbaras a state ofmoralpiety that was first articulated by the Sages (see; Bahya ben Asher,Kad Hakemah, “Orhim”; Metzudat Davidon), and this interpersonal dimension remains a powerful feature of the ideal to which we aspire. As these sources teach, one should make one’s homehefker kemidbar, free and open for all—cultivating an ethic of hospitality in which the poor and the less fortunate feel free to come and be cared for. The model of wilderness, ofmidbar, is here taken to be an inspiration to live a life of openness and kindness toward other human beings. As the modern monk Thomas Merton said: “The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude…It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and my sister” (Entering the Silence, 2:398). In this reading,hefker is understood in the most charitable and positive sense of “free for all,” as opposed to the more pejorative meaning ofhefkeras a chaotic and uncontrolled “free-for-all.” The openness of amidbar-state-of-being is one that inspires kindness and generosity: the gentleness needed to sincerely love one’s fellow person. That gentleness is the silent speech of God flowing though man and woman to be realized as moral living. Integrating Merton’s insight with the Jewish sources we have considered, the retreat of solitude is filled with the living word of God, the breath of divine sustenance. It is our spiritual work to let that divine solitude refine the openness and gentleness with which we treat our fellow human beings.

To paraphrase the teaching: You will attain the true soul of Torah only when you have made yourself hefker kemidbar—a person cleansed of superficial obsessions, gentle and generous toward other people, one who has nullified the grip of pride and egoism. As the early Hasidic rebbe R. Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk (Pri Ha’aretz, Letter 27) taught, true wisdom and humanity rises from the cultivation of deep humility:

The Torah only stands firm in one who makes himself like a����������������ڰ��� before those who are poor of mind and rich of mind, and he doesn’t think of himself as better than his friend. On the contrary, he should be completely nullified before his friend, and it is through this that they become united and bound up one with the other.

True spiritual refinement, the deepest attainment ofhefker kemidbar, must not remain at the level of individualistic mystical growth and the personal quest for divine revelation. To realize the ideals of piety, to ensconce the living Torah in the wholeness of oneself, a person must aspire toward a genuine humility, to avoid the harmful path of judgmentalism and arrogance. It is in the bond of loving friendship and fellowship, in kindness and humility toward the other, that the Torah—and God—are most radiantly revealed.

This commentary was originally published in 2017.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

The fourth book of the Torah (“Bemidbar Sinai”) begins with a census of the (male) heads of clans among the Israelites in the second year of their freedom. And then, it lays out the pattern according to which the 12 tribes and the religious functionaries (���𱹾�’i�� and kohanim) are to set up camp in the wilderness. When you read it, you are struck by the attention to detail and good order, something which is rather typical in documents with a priestly source. 

There is an aspect to that template for establishing camp that can escape attention but has fascinated me for some time. Imagine that you were able to take an aerial photo of the Israelite camp at one of its wilderness stations. What would you see? According to our text, you would see a holy site at the center (the Mishkan), so sacred that it is off limits to all but a select few. And emanating from the altar at that center is a column of smoke that never goes out (as Leviticus 6:6 requires). Surrounding that holy precinct are Moses and Aaron, and the remainders of the clans of the religious leaders of the people. And finally, in an outer concentric circle, you would see the various tribes of the Israelites, constituting the goy kadosh, the holy people of which Exodus 19:6 spoke. 

What is noteworthy about that “skycam” photo? It is just what an aerial shot of the day of revelation at Mount Sinai would have looked like(!): the holy people surrounding the mountain; an inner ring with the kohanim; Moses, Aaron and a few others of their clan even further in; and finally, an all-but-untouchable mountain peak at the center, exuding smoke like the “smoke of a kiln.” The Israelite camp was constructed to be a replica of Mount Sinai on the day of revelation. 

In other words, the apparently dry instructions at the beginning of Bemidbar are actually a prescription for a most important religious practice. It is captured in the imperative “Zakhor,” which Abraham Joshua Heschel understood not as a mere intellectual activity of recall, but as the practice of putting oneself back into a foundational spiritual experience. It is to be at Sinai, in addition to simply remembering the story of what happened there. And extending that, we can say that bringing all of the spiritual moments in our lives with us on our journeys is a crucial prescription that we are given in this fourth book of the Pentateuch. Since it is also the final Shabbat before the celebration and reenactment (through late night study) of the revelation on Shavuot, the lesson it brings with it should particularly command our attention. 

Find an alternative perspective on the Israelite encampment here.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).   

Hidden within statistical data, this parashah conveys a sense of awe. It relates a foundational moment, where a large group of people, those who had experienced the exodus from Egypt and begun their journey through the wilderness, are ordered by God to gather together to be counted. This moment evokes God’s earlier promise to Abraham and his descendants to make them countless, “as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands of the seashore” (Gen. 22:17). Yet rather than the sublime poetry of the infinite, here we have facts and data, household names and numbers, providing an image of what this nascent People looks like.

A closer look at the biblical passage reveals how the census represents a critical moment of identity formation. The very names listed lend this group of individuals a sense of holiness, since theophoric names like Ammishaddai, Eliab, and Eliasaph contain syllables reflecting the various names of God. This purposeful act of nation building is likewise enacted kinesthetically. The term used in the parashah for taking a census is se’u rosh, which literally means “lift up the head,” suggesting that “the act of counting should lift people’s heads, and help them feel that their lives and contributions have dignity and meaning” (Salkin 160).[2] Even the result of the military census, which totaled 603,550 people, has been imbued with a sense of the sacred by later exegetes. The Hasidic teacher Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev taught that the number of Israelites was identical to the number of letters in the Torah scroll, implying a confluence between the sacred text and the collective body of the People who are enacting God’s word. As biblical scholars have indicated, this formative moment marks the “Initial religious and social organization that would establish the community ideally as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Harrison 29).[3]

As we learned more, we became convinced that this parashah was especially appropriate for becoming a bar mitzvah, which marks entering into “the age of commandments” and being counted as a full adult member of the Jewish community.  Yet when Covid shut down NYC, we postponed the bar mitzvah to the following year, and my son found a new parashah. Likewise, Covid impacted the US census, since many census bureau employees fell sick, and there were numerous data collection issues.

In truth, even without a pandemic, censuses are already a fraught matter. They tend to result in omissions, excluding and obscuring as much as they include and clarify. In the biblical passage, the military census only counted men who were 20 years and over and able to bear arms, and the census for the Levites only included males within this priestly group from one month old. The former leaves out women, girls, boys, and anyone with a disability, while the latter omits all non-Levites and all females. These other populations are thus not included in this holy collective.

Likewise, the US has historically undercounted populations, particularly communities of color and immigrants. For the 2020 census, a controversial “citizen question” was considered, creating a risk that non-citizens, who had been counted in prior censuses, would be discouraged from participating. There is a lot at stake in these numbers, since they help determine the allocation of resources and the right to political representation. These numbers reset the country’s political map, determining how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets for the next decade.

Now, two years later, it is clear that what had been feared has in fact occurred. According to data reported by the New York Times:

Although the bureau did not say how many people it missed entirely, they were mostly people of color, disproportionately young ones. The census missed counting 4.99 of every 100 Hispanics, 5.64 of every 100 Native Americans and 3.3 of every 100 African Americans. In contrast, for every 100 residents counted, the census wrongly added 1.64 non-Hispanic whites and 2.62 ethnic Asians (Wines and Cramer).[4]

The questions that both this parashah and the 2020 census raise in our current moment are, what is our obligation when conducting a census and what is our obligation to the uncounted? If a census is meant to capture a moment in time, and to help paint a picture of a society, the very way we count and address the shortcomings of our census process determines not just who we are, but also who we want to be as a nation.

The very idea of a democracy—a government in which supreme power is invested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through representation—underscores the importance of efforts to ensure a fair and inclusive census and policies that empower the uncounted. The last large gathering that my family attended before the lockdown was to hear Stacey Abrams talk about the political importance of the census and her efforts to ensure everyone is counted. Her organization, “Fair Count,” aims to “build long-term power in communities that have been historically undercounted in the decennial census, underrepresented at the polls, and whose communities are often torn apart in redistricting.”  At that event, we were struck by the empathy of Abrams’ approach, which reminded me of Yehuda Amichai’s poem “To the Full Extent of Compassion:”

Count them.
Yes. You can count them. They
are not like the sand upon the sea shore. They
are not like the stars of the heaven for multitude.
They’re like lonely people.
On the corner and in the street.

Count them.  See them
seeing the sky through ruined houses.
Find a way out of the stones and come back. What
will you come back to? But count them, for they
do their time in dreams
and they walk around outside and their hopes, unbandaged,
are gaping, and they will die of them.

Count them.
Too soon have they learned to read the terrible
handwriting on the wall. To read and write upon
other walls.  And the feast goes on in silence.

Count them. Be present for they
have already used up all the blood and there’s still not enough,
as in a dangerous operation, where one is exhausted
and beaten down like ten thousand. For who’s judge and what’s
judgement
unless it be to the full extent of Night
and the full severity of compassion.[5]

Amichai’s poem evokes God’s promise to Abraham, as well as other instances of counting in the Bible, such as the censuses in Bemidbar, yet it reverses such grand national narratives by focusing on individuals who are typically not seen or counted. This poem challenges us with a sense of urgency to view the uncounted with the “full severity of compassion,” or, in Isabel Wilkerson’s words, to develop a kind of radical empathy. This radical empathy demands that we see other people as deserving of rights and the feeling that “their lives and contributions have dignity and meaning.” And, on the most literal level, it insists that we use our modern censuses to reflect the diverse communities that we are and that we fight for the inclusive society we should be.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

[1] As suggested by Michael Wines in his New York Times article, “Seven Decades Later, the 1950 Census Bares Its Secrets,” from March 31, 2022.

[2] J.K. Salkin (2017) The JPS B’nai Mitzvah Torah Commentary, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society.

[3] R.K. Harrison (1992) Numbers: An Exegetical Commentary, MI: Baker Academic.

[4] Michael Wines and Maria Cramer, “2020 Census Undercounted Hispanic, Black and Native American Residents,” New York Times, March 10, 2022.

[5] This poem is translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, in Chana Kronfeld’s The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016.

The Midrash teaches us that God destroyed the world several times before creating our world (Bereishit Rabbah 3:7 and 9:2). Famously, after the flood, God establishes a covenant with Noah, Noah’s sons, and all living things. God says: “I will maintain My covenant [beriti] with you: never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth” (Gen. 9:11). When we read this verse in light of the midrash, we understand that God came very close to destroying the world again, but managed to enact a symbolic destruction, providing some people and some of the living creatures with a way to survive. This covenant is the vehicle for keeping humanity and all of creation connected with the divine even when rupture looms as a possibility.

In this week’s Torah and haftarah portions, the specter of rupture looms repeatedly. First, we are reminded of the deaths of Aaron’s two older sons, Nadav and Avihu. Though they had entered into a sacred pact to serve God in the intimacy of God’s holiest places, they got it wrong—they “offered alien fire before the Lord” (Num. 3:4)—and died as a result. Their missing the mark led to their deaths and a transfer of the sacred role from the older to the younger sons. Similarly, our parashah then recounts the undoing of the sacred place held by the firstborn sons, chosen to be dedicated to God when they were saved from the tenth plague, the plague of the slaying of the firstborn. While God simply asserts that Moses should substitute the Levites for the firstborn sons (Num. 3:41), we must notice that, once again, a special relationship of service has been abrogated and a new group has replaced the original one.

Finally, in the haftarah, Hosea tells the story of Israel the unfaithful, through the vehicle of Gomer, his harlot-wife. While there is much in this haftarah to suggest that rupture is imminent, the haftarah ends with the words of a covenant renewed:

And I will espouse you forever:
I will espouse you with righteousness and justice,
And with goodness and mercy (hesed verahamim),
And I will espouse you with faithfulness (����’e���ܲԲ���);
Then you shall be devoted (����ⲹ�岹’a��) to the Lord. (Hos. 2:21–22)

Growing up, I always felt deeply confident that God’s covenant with the Jewish people was inviolable. No matter what we did, God would always be connected to us, bound up in our fate. I have always found this promise tremendously reassuring. But when I read these texts, I start to feel an anxiety that the possibilities of rupture are real. The power of Hosea’s words is precisely the knowledge that the binding of God and Israel cannot be taken for granted. We cannot read the verses I have quoted without having an awareness of the danger of that covenant being dissolved. Surely the naming of Gomer’s son makes the reality of the severing of relationship very clear. “Then He said, ‘Name him Lo-ammi [not my people]; for you are not My people and I will not be your [God]’” (Hos. 1:9).

Given that Hosea’s story focuses on the relationship between God and Israel through the paradigm of marriage, the haftarah quite naturally leads me to think about the reality of covenant in terms of divorce. The Jewish wedding incorporates the possibility of the rupture of the marriage, by way of either divorce or death, through the vehicle of the ketubbah. The ketubbah’s original purpose was to protect the woman in case of divorce or death. One might ask: Why must the specter of separation enter into the joy of the wedding day? While that desire to flee from reality is understandable, I find it heartening that Judaism does not indulge us in this way. Even on the day when we commit ourselves to our beloved, we must acknowledge that the union cannot rest on the reassurance that the covenant is permanent. We must make provisions for proper treatment of one another even in worst-case scenarios. It is only when we make room for those possibilities that we can make the difficult choices that will enable us to live in right relationship. Only when I know that divorce is real can I stop and listen to my partner when he or she is frustrated with the same fight we’ve had over and over. Only when I know that death is real can I make choices about how to live in the face of overwhelming limitations. A marriage that cannot envision that the marriage itself is a fragile arrangement is not a marriage that can be challenged to make difficult choices when crises emerge.

So I return to the verse from Hosea, “And I will espouse you forever.” How does that espousal work? Judaism guides us in making this process concrete. Every day (except Shabbat), when Jews wrap tefillin (phylacteries), we say these verses as we wrap. The wrapping and reciting become a meditation about recommitting ourselves to the hard work of being espoused. I cannot be passive. I must act. So I affirm, “I will espouse you with righteousness and justice.” There’s a promise in there that my actions will lead to just desserts. So then I say, “And with goodness and mercy (hesed verahamim).” These attributes reassure me that even though I must focus on what I can do, the reality that follows my actions is tied up in God’s boundless love and mercy, the boundless love and mercy of the other. Even when I err, rupture is not decidedly what follows. So then I say, “And I will espouse you with faithfulness.” This faithfulness, emunah, draws on the idea of trust and steadfastness. When we live with a balance of all these attributes, then we can be faithfully bound to one another and to God. This sense of balance enables us to say “veyadat et Adonai,” which I would translate as “then you shall know God.”

The sacred partnership with another human being echoes our sacred partnership with God. When we know another person in loving relationship, and respect that we cannot take that relationship for granted, then we become motivated to make the choices that keep the relationship vital. We must do the same in our relationship with the Divine.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

The chieftains of each tribe are named, and an identical formula is recited, concluding with the number of men over the age of twenty—fighting men—in each tribe. For this is not a census of the entire people, rather it is an accounting of those who will make up an army to cross the desert. The Israelites have just celebrated the first anniversary of their liberation, and they are about to embark on a journey that will last thirty-eight years, although they do not know that at the time of the census. They are forming an army to take the population on what should be a short sojourn to the Promised Land. That they should form an army to cross the desert is not surprising; but, we may ask, why the apparent preoccupation with numbers?

The Bible’s preoccupation with numbers parallels our own. Numbers lend specificity and veracity to narrative. Whether it is the number of lives lost in a tsunami or homes lost in a wildfire or the number of career home runs for a baseball player, numbers are concrete. They give the reader a means of taking hold of the story. Abraham was promised that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sands of the sea, and yet here are Abraham’s descendants and we are told precisely how many there are, at least how many fighting men.

Furthermore, large numbers have a way of lending gravity and importance to what is being described. Quantitative descriptions provoke an emotional response that qualitative descriptions often do not. We have a tendency to make judgments based on numbers and not make the effort to look beyond the raw data in our evaluations. In an interview some years ago, a well-known Orthodox rabbi was quoted as predicting the demise of both the Conservative and Reform movements, based on an uncritical assessment of census data. He has rightly been much criticized for his statement, because although numbers may excite us or frighten us or bore us, they can make a story interesting on a superficial level; but by themselves, they do not lead to a deep understanding of either a text or of life.

So let us take a deeper look at the numbers in Numbers 1–4. At the time of the Exodus, we read that there were approximately 600,000 men, not including children (Exod. 12:37). And now, after a year in the desert, after the killing of some 3000 associated with the golden calf episode, as well as the death of even more in the plague that followed, the Israelites now number 603,550 men of fighting age, plus 22,000 Levite males over the age of one month. Although modern Bible scholars have pointed out that this number cannot be understood literally, their specificity is intriguing.

The census occurs on several levels of particularity. The heads of the tribes are mentioned individually by name, and each paragraph concludes with the number of men in each tribe. Within these paragraphs, we are told that the counting was done according to clans and ancestral houses and that those in the census were counted by name (bemispar shemot), though we are not given here the names of the ancestral houses or of the individuals. Finally, we are told the grand total of fighting men among the Israelites. The census of the Levites, carried out separately from the general census, proceeds in similar manner, citing the names of the heads of the clans and the numbers in each clan, before enumerating the total number of Levites over the age of one month.

What we have here is a juxtaposition of the individual and the collective. There is a total number of Israelites, but it is made up of individuals with names, relationships, and histories. The Slonimer Rebbe (Netivot Shalom), in his commentary on Numbers, notes that the number of the Israelites—603,550—is equal to the number of words in the Torah. Just as the Torah is a unity made up of individual words, the People of Israel is a unity made up of individuals. Remove even a word and the Torah is incomplete. Remove even one person, Israel cannot receive the Torah. This, he suggests, is why in most years, as in this year, Parashat Bemidbar is read on the Shabbat immediately preceding Shavuot. This census is meant to remind us that the act of kabbalat haTorah (receiving the Torah) is an individual one, performed collectively in community; or stated conversely, a collective act performed by individuals. The fulfillment of the Torah, the Slonimer tells us, can only be accomplished when Kelal Yisra’el (the whole community of the people Israel) acts in unity.

So the use of numbers in ways that are meant to divide us, to emphasize differences rather than similarities, and to create disunity and dissension, is not only a misuse and misrepresentation, but is a violation of the collective effort needed to bring light to the world. When we stand at Sinai to receive the Torah on Shavuot, we need to remember that while we do so as individuals, the act can only have true meaning when we do so as part of a collective, as part of Kelal Yisra’el.

A version of this commentary was originally published in 5769.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Parashah Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

The book of Bemidbar, which aims to help its readers navigate the chaotic wilderness in which the Children of Israel have always lived and wandered, deals more directly than any other book of the Torah with what the great sociologist Max Weber called “Politics as a Vocation.”

Jews have no choice but to be concerned with politics. We are a people, and therefore have lives to protect and interests to advance. Following Zionist parlance, I call these matters of thriving and survival “normalcy.” But Jews are also a faith community: committed since Sinai to serving the covenant made there with God, fellow Jews, and the world. There is a right path to be walked through the wilderness, called mitzvah, and much good to be done in the world. We are commanded to make the world more just and merciful, in accordance with the wishes of the Creator. This is our enduring, life-giving vocation as a people.

It is clear from our own experience, as well as from the narratives of the Torah, that the two aims—normalcy and covenant—will at times be in tension or even conflict. Every “is” sooner or later collides with the “oughts” that tell us how things should be, as opposed to how they are and always have been. Ponder Bemidbar’s many tales of power and intrigue, internecine struggle and battles with external foes, and you come away convinced that a Jewish theory of politics as a vocation can never be simple or straightforward.

There will always be a need to count the people Israel, to delimit its members, and to determine who among them can be counted on. This occurs in the opening census that gives the Book of Numbers its name. One can expect periodic rebellions against divine and human authority like the one undertaken by Korah, a populist demagogue who proclaimed that “all the people are holy” just as they are, without need of the strictures or guidance of law to make them so. The people for their part will at times vote and think with their stomachs rather than their heads, will let fear conquer their judgment or give in to base desires. At other moments they, or at least some of them, will summon the courage needed to face the unknown and stride confidently toward the future. Neighboring peoples will inevitably be encountered on the way. Some of them will turn out to be enemies, others allies, and still others an ambiguous, shifting combination of the two.

And, in the midst of all the realpolitik, blessing will be conferred and received. Divine light will shine through human eyes. Refracted there, it will elicit unexpected goodness and ennoble the practice of politics. With God’s help there may even be a measure of shalom: peace with others, and fulfilment of self.

Max Weber begins his essay “Politics as a Vocation” with two definitions relevant to our own reflection on politics as a Jewish vocation. He suggests first that the word, politics, “comprises any kind of independent leadership in action,” expressed in policy of virtually any sort and common to every kind of human group imaginable. The emphasis in this conception falls on “independent.” What course an individual or group should take in a given situation is never entirely clear. Every such decision involves risk. When one leads a group of people and bears responsibility for their welfare—as opposed to issuing recommendations, or engaging in theory that need not be translated into actions—one enters the domain of politics. A responsible political leader must bear in mind that life is short, resources scarce, dissent inevitable, and peaceful or violent competition ever-present.

Jews have been familiar with this sort of politics since the beginning, and over the course of two millennia in Diaspora, our ancestors acquired great skill in its practice. You and I would not be here today as Jews had their political choices not been wise much of the time. Discrimination, persecutions, expulsions, pogroms—and worse—were of course not infrequent events in our history. But neither were they the whole story. Besides: as our late friend and teacher Alan Mintz (��”l) reminds us, the key to Jewish history is not catastrophe but “creative survival” in the face of destruction. I would add that another key has been the ability to take maximum advantage of the blessings which have come our way. Jewish politics today in North America and much of the world is largely concerned with protecting collective interests and advancing communal well-being in unprecedented conditions of affluence and opportunity.

Weber then adds a second definition of politics that makes his address still more relevant to Jewish politics in the age of renewed Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Politics in this narrower sense is “the leadership, or the influencing of the leadership, of a political association, hence today, of a state.” What is a state? Weber approvingly cites Trotsky’s dictum that “every state is founded on force,” and proceeds to declare—in a formulation that has often been cited by scholars of politics—that “a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory.”

When Korah challenges the authority of Moses and Aaron, he is explicitly contesting Moses’s claim to decide—as God’s agent among the Israelites—what use of force is legitimate. God intervenes to settle the argument—and even then the people who rallied to Korah’s cause remain restless. Jews have long experience over the centuries in influencing or seeking to influence those with power in the states where we resided. All of those rulers were of course Gentiles. Think of Mordecai and Esther in Ahashuerus’s palace, or the many “court Jews” who plied their trade in Christian or Islamic lands. But only since 1948 have Jews regained regular access to the kind of force routinely exercised by police and armies. Only in the State of Israel, therefore, have Jews had to decide when the use of Judaism to justify violence perpetrated by the state is legitimate.

The Orthodox philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, reacting to the invocation of divine authority by the Gush Emunim movement of West Bank settlers, asserted categorically that “no state whatsoever, in the past, present, or any foreseeable future, in any society, in any era, in any culture, including the Jewish culture, ever was or will ever be anything but a secular institution …. The State of Israel of our day has no religious significance.” (“The Religious Significance of the State of Israel” in Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State)

I fully understand Leibowitz’s fury, though I would not deny the State of Israel all religious significance. We Jews are the heirs to prophetic and rabbinic traditions that regularly questioned state policy in the name of a higher standard set by God, and particularly the unjust use of power. We have made a habit of speaking truth to power, and have often suffered as a result. Today, Jews wield that power in the State of Israel. Prophetic critique pits Jews versus Jews and, often, sets one reading of Torah against another.

This situation is of course without precedent. Imagine a sage from the ancient academies, the Middle Ages, or the shtetls of early modern Europe or North Africa re-awakening, Rip Van Winkle-style, in May 2018 to headlines reporting that “Israel [i.e., an army of Jews] strikes military assets of Iran in Syria.” That sort of Jewish political action would be utterly incomprehensible. Classical Jewish texts on politics often prove inadequate to the dilemmas Israelis face regularly. My personal friends in Israel include not only attorneys, civil servants, and professors, but experts in national security and critics of Israeli military policy. New sorts of Jewish selves have been created by the Zionist revolution—and new ways of practicing and conceiving the vocation of Jewish politics.

These issues came to the fore early in the history of the State, as we see from a set of fascinating exchanges between Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and leading Jewish intellectuals and scholars in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They argued about Ben-Gurion’s appropriation of the language of messianism, his creation of a Jewish civil religion to legitimate the policies of the state, and about the use of power to achieve national objectives.

“Moses never used force?” Ben-Gurion asked rhetorically at one point. The rabbinic sages had a problem with it, replied Ephraim Urbach, one of the leading experts on those sages. There is no necessary contradiction between ideals and power, Ben- Gurion retorted. Historian Jacob Talmon warned about the dangers inherent in “totalitarian democracy.” “One can use power in a just cause,” Ben-Gurion insisted. He reminded his interlocutors that, unlike them, he was in regular contact with soldiers and their families. “You are a historian,” he told Talmon, whereas those in government “have a vision to which we are obligated: the future of the Jewish people.” (David Ohana, Messianism and Statism 188–194)

Ben-Gurion, prime minister in a sovereign Jewish state, clearly enjoyed playing biblical king, practicing realpolitik as David and Solomon once did, against sages who—acting politically like Diaspora rabbis—were prudent, careful, and sober in judgment. In a similar interchange with Martin Buber, conducted in 1949, the philosopher chided the prime minister for using the religious language of “redemption” for secular state purposes.

MB: “We said redemption of the soil and meant to make it the soil of Jews. Jewish soil for what?”
DBG: “To bring forth bread from the soil.”
MB: “For what?”
DBG: “So as to eat.”
MB: “For what?
DBG: “Enough!” (Ibid., 74)

The prime minister had the power to shut down argument when he pleased—but he knew as well as Buber that the legitimation of his power, and that of the Jewish state, depended on Jews (and others too!) believing that the actions taken by the state advanced vital Jewish interests and cleaved to the highest Jewish principles.

This is how Jews make our way through the wilderness in 2018, relatively new to the facts of statehood in the Land of Israel and of influence and affluence in North America. We figure out as we go what Jewish politics means in this situation for our eternal vocation. Jews need normalcy. We have to eat. But we also need covenant—which requires that the question of “for what” never cease.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Moshe, too, after killing the Egyptian and prior to his divine call to leadership, retreats to the wilderness, a period of withdrawal into a space outside the habitation of society. It was only in that space, R. Bahya ben Asher suggests, far from the yishuv (dwelling place) of the population, that Moshe could reenact the prophetic encounter of his ancestors, a withdrawal for the sake of spiritual and moral elevation (commentary to Exod. 3:1). Like Moshe the solitary shepherd, the people of Israel must undergo a spiritual transformation, a process of purification—from the impure state of idolatry to the refined condition necessary to enter the holy land. This purification is represented by the desolate nature of the wilderness—a vast emptiness that facilitates a breakthrough in mind and soul. As Kathleen Norris has written, evoking life on the Great Plains of Dakota as a spiritual practice:

Here the eye learns to appreciate slight variations, the possibilities inherent in emptiness. It sees that the emptiness is full of small things… A person is forced inward by the spareness of what is outward and visible in all this land and sky… Maybe seeing the Plains is like seeing an icon: what seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state (Dakota, pp. 156-7).

The experience of what appears to be emptiness is an opening into another state of spiritual perception, an opening of the heart into the concealed indwelling of divine holiness. The sublime interior of the human soul is revealed in that moment of mystery and grandeur before the vastness of the All.

Likewise, R. Bahya asks, restating an earlier midrashic teaching (Tanhuma, 6; Bemidbar Rabbah, 1:7): why does the Torah emphasize God’s speech to Moshe in the wilderness of Sinai (בְּמִדְבַּר סִינַי)? It was to teach that “a person does not attain the Torah until they have made themselves empty and abandoned like the wilderness” (אין אדם קונה התורה עד שיעשה עצמו הפקר כמדבר) [commentary to Num. 1:1]. To receive the revelation of Torah—or perhaps a bit less grandly, to let Torah take root in one’s heart—a person must first make themselves into a midbar, an inner empty wilderness that is cleared of all the weeds and brush that obstruct true perception and feeling. A wilderness that returns to the first purity of nature.

Just as divine revelation and the Torah arise from the physical space of wilderness, of midbar—at the burning bush and then at Mount Sinai—a heart infused with divine Torah arises through a person’s mindful cultivation of their own interior wilderness. One should seek to attain the level of hefker—of feeling unbound by the pride and egoism of ownership, of being unattached to materialism. In hefker consciousness, we train our spiritual sight to see the Divine Presence that dwells beneath the surface, beneath the many golden calves of our obsessions, possessions, and wayward priorities. This is a radical reinvention of the concept of hefker, a neutral halakhic category of abandonment and ownerlessness (e.g. BT Eruvin, 45b).

In this transformed reading, the midbar may be said to embody a pure state of emptiness—an inner cleansing that allows us to go deeper into the spiritual path. Becoming hefker kemidbar is a process of letting go of our imprisonment in materiality, in ephemeral and finite desires—to be liberated into the vastness of an inner wilderness. As R. Nahman of Bratzlav taught (Likutei Moharan I:52), the most profound opening of the heart to God takes place in the physical space of darkness and wilderness, the frightening ground of loneliness and alienation. It is in hitbodedut (solitude) that we are able to empty our minds and hearts of society’s overwhelming drumbeat, where the ultimate bitul hayeish (erasure of superficial, mundane consciousness) becomes possible, and we are truly opened in all of our vulnerability before Divinity. In that place of midbar, we are able to break open the heart in ways we didn’t know were possible, to cry out to God from a place of the deepest emotional honesty. The midbar is an inner place of psyche as much as it is a terrestrial location.

But it was hefker kemidbar as a state of moral piety that was first articulated by the Sages (see BT Sanhedrin, 49a; Bahya ben Asher, Kad Hakemah, “Orhim”; Metzudat David on I Kings 2:34), and this interpersonal dimension remains a powerful feature of the ideal to which we aspire. As these sources teach, one should make one’s home hefker kemidbar, free and open for all—cultivating an ethic of hospitality in which the poor and the less fortunate feel free to come and be cared for. The model of wilderness, of midbar, is here taken to be an inspiration to live a life of openness and kindness toward other human beings. As the modern monk Thomas Merton said: “The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude…It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and my sister” (Entering the Silence, 2:398). In this reading, hefker is understood in the most charitable and positive sense of “free for all,” as opposed to the more pejorative meaning of hefker as a chaotic and uncontrolled “free-for-all.” The openness of a midbar-state-of-being is one that inspires kindness and generosity: the gentleness needed to sincerely love one’s fellow person. That gentleness is the silent speech of God flowing though man and woman to be realized as moral living. Integrating Merton’s insight with the Jewish sources we have considered, the retreat of solitude is filled with the living word of God, the breath of divine sustenance. It is our spiritual work to let that divine solitude refine the openness and gentleness with which we treat our fellow human beings.

To paraphrase the teaching: You will attain the true soul of Torah only when you have made yourself hefker kemidbar—a person cleansed of superficial obsessions, gentle and generous toward other people, one who has nullified the grip of pride and egoism. As the early Hasidic rebbe R. Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk (Pri Ha’aretz, Letter 27) taught, true wisdom and humanity rises from the cultivation of deep humility:

The Torah only stands firm in one who makes himself like a midbar hefker before those who are poor of mind and rich of mind, and he doesn’t think of himself as better than his friend. On the contrary, he should be completely nullified before his friend, and it is through this that they become united and bound up one with the other.

True spiritual refinement, the deepest attainment of hefker kemidbar, must not remain at the level of individualistic mystical growth and the personal quest for divine revelation. To realize the ideals of piety, to ensconce the living Torah in the wholeness of oneself, a person must aspire toward a genuine humility, to avoid the harmful path of judgmentalism and arrogance. It is in the bond of loving friendship and fellowship, in kindness and humility toward the other, that the Torah—and God—are most radiantly revealed.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).