8 Billion, and One
Sermon Shabbat Chayei Sarah 5783
Last week the UN announced that the 8 billionth person on earth had been born. This marked a new high in world population, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it “an occasion to celebrate our diversity, recognize our common humanity, and marvel at advancements in health that have extended lifespans and dramatically reduced maternal and child mortality rates.” All fine sentiments indeed as we crossed the 8 billion population number for the earth.
Now 8 billion is quite a number, remarkable to even think about. That’s 8,000 million people, for example—and a million is a number that few of us can really grasp. And whatever fears people have had about the overpopulation of the Earth, however many humans were tragically killed the last few years by COVID, or in terrible wars, somehow or other our human race keeps muddling on and, well, growing. I don’t know if you fall into the “we-have-too-many-people-for-the-planet-and-it’s-irresponsible-to-have-children” crowd or “the we don’t have enough humans and should grow and populate the solar system” group, but wherever you individually land on this issue, one way or another, we now have 8 billion of us here.
Out of that 8 billion, we Jews only number about 18 million people, maximum, these days. Interestingly, in our Torah portion of Chayei Sarah this week Rebecca’s brother and father send her off to marry Isaac with a blessing, at hayi l’alfei re’vavah—may you become the mother of thousands of ten-thousands. We still use this phrase in the build-up to a Jewish wedding when we do the bedeken, the veiling ceremony. Literally, if you do the math, when we say “May you become the mother of thousands of ten-thousands” we are saying “may you become the mother of ten millions.” We Jews now total around about two of those ten million now, all descended from our matriarch Rebecca. In a way that blessing, first given 3700 years or so ago, has literally come true.
It turns out that experts in population scholarship, historical demographers, have done some calculations on the number of Jews throughout time. They have estimated that there were approximately 7 million Jews in the world prior to the Great Revolt against Rome and the destruction of the 2nd Temple, which ended in the year 70. Based on their estimates of the Jewish population of the known world back in antiquity, they have calculated that if we Jews had not experienced horrendous persecution and Anti-Semitic attacks in their many forms over the centuries, Jewish world population would have been expected to grow, by modern times, to literally hundreds of millions. Imagine that: not 18 million Jews, but 400 million Jews. Think of the arguments we could have! What’s that old joke? Roses are read, violets are bluish; if it wasn’t for Christmas we’d all be Jewish?
Actually, these demographic scientists make the case that if it wasn’t for brutal persecution and Anti-Semitism a lot more of us would be Jewish, if not everyone.
Even if the much more contemporary disaster of the Holocaust had not occurred, just 70 years ago, demographers agree that we would have something on the order of 32 million Jews in the world today, instead of 18 million.
Of course, those tragic persecutions did take place, and drastically curtailed Jewish population, so much so that Israeli geneticist Shai Carmi and his team of scientists have calculated that all the Jews in the world today are actually descended from a population base of no more than 350 individuals, total, an even mix of Middle Eastern and European Jews. That is, at some point around the year 1350 there were no more than 350 Jews who passed on their chromosomes to the rest of us.
Another genetic study believes that half of all Ashkenazic Jews—half of all Ashkenazi Jews! Something like 4 million people—are actually descended from a total of four women living in the Roman period. They are the historical matriarchs of our people, sort of the Sarah/Rebecca/Rachel and Leah of half of Ashkenazic Jewry.
So just when you think that even among Jews there are enough of us to go around without your help, that your own contribution to this complex people is unimportant, remember that you might just end up being the ancestor of something like half of our people someday. I mean, it happened within historical time once before. And of course, the Torah portions we are exploring in the early parts of Genesis now each have just two people carrying on the entire heritage of Judaism and belief: first Abraham and Sarah, then Isaac and Rebecca.
So in a very real way, each Jew matters. Or at least, when two of us are having children together, apparently, and passing on our genes.
But this week we learned a lesson that went beyond even that. Just when you think that any one person’s vote doesn’t matter in a large democracy—there are so many of us, there’s so much noise around elections these days and they are never decided by one vote, anyway—there arrived a story this past week that contradicts that.
A high school Spanish teacher in Connecticut named Chris Poulos decided to run for the state General Assembly in an open seat with no incumbent. He was energetic, knocking on 5,300 doors to ask people to vote for him, in a district with fewer than 11,000 total voters. Essentially, he knocked, quite literally, on half the doors in the district and shook many, many hands.
On election night the results came in. Poulos had a six-vote lead over his Republican opponent Tony Morrison, a retired tech executive. But in a recanvas of more than 10,000 ballots over the course of the day last Monday that lead dropped to a single vote. And that’s where it stayed.
The final total was 5,297 votes for Poulos to 5,296 votes for Morrison.
“Having knocked on 5,300 doors it’s clear that people are divided,” Poulos said. “We need to wipe the slate clean of animosity and we need to move forward together in a civil and productive way to do what's best for our town and our state.”
He praised town election workers for an “absolutely professional” handling of ballots.
Lawyers for both parties oversaw the recanvas of ballots. Steve Kalkowski, Southington Republican Town Committee chairman, said he’s never seen an election decided by one vote.
“There was one hand count ballot that was the difference. The voter put their pen on Morrison and made a dot then circled Poulos,” Kalkowski said. “That did it.”
One vote. One person’s vote, to be more specific, was the difference in that election.
The closely divided nature of our national electorate has been demonstrated repeatedly in recent years, and even decades. That has made politics seem like a zero-sum game, and a painful one at many times. We win, you lose; or you win, we lose. And it all conspires to make us feel frustrated and even powerless.
But looked at through the lens of this one election, I think we can take a quite different lesson of individual empowerment. One vote can make the difference. Each vote matters.
That is, every single person counts. What a great reminder of that essential truth, one that Judaism has always believed, from Abraham’s time to Rebecca’s time to those four Roman matriarchs to that medieval total of 350 Jews to our own time. Each individual human being matters. Every single person has value.
As Pirkei Avot teaches us in the Mishna, she’ein l’cha adam she’ein lo sha’a, there is no person who has not their hour. Every one of us matters.
And the Talmud tells us that one who saves a single life is accorded the merit of having saved the entire world. Each of us counts.
That’s a lesson worth relearning, again and again, for it’s true not just in an election like that one in Connecticut, not just in some genetic passage of DNA, but in every aspect of life.
When we believe someone is below our notice, we miss the central truth that every single person has value. And when we are down or depressed, we may also fail to realize that we, too, matter and will have our time. We are, each of us, created in the image of God.
Whether it’s one single vote in a state election in Connecticut, or being the tenth person in a minyan at a synagogue service, or doing our own part to carry on the work of a valuable larger organization, or caring for our own families. Each of us matters. Everyone counts.
That’s something we need to be reminded of, again and again. And it’s something we learned again this week.
May we remember it over this Shabbat, and in the weeks, months, and years to come.