Everyone Counts

Shabbat Bamidbar 5782 Sermon

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

If you have ever closely read our Torah portion this week, then you know that in most ways Bamidbar is a stupendously dull portion, one of the least superficially interesting Torah portions of the entire year.  After all, it’s nothing more than a series of lists, a counting, a census of people.  How many were in the tribe of Reuben, head by head, one by one, age twenty and over, all able to go out to war?  46,500.  How many were in the tribe of Shimon, head by head, one by one, age twenty and over, all able to go out to war?  59,300.  How many in the tribe of Gad, Judah, Issachar, Zevulun, Ephraim, Menasseh, Benjamin, Dan, Asher, Naphtali, head by head, one by one, age twenty and over, all able to go out to war, on and on, thousands upon thousands, all counted one at a time?  Numbers and numbers and numbers, added together, a Torah portion only an accountant could love. 

No wonder there are so many Jewish CPAs.

But then, on closer examination, Bamidbar looks—well, even less intriguing.  Details about the arrangement of the camping sites of the tribes.  Minutiae relating to the census.  Nothing with the vaguest whiff of interest or challenge or meaning.  Nothing fun at all. 

In fact, when you come right down to it, most of Bamidbar looks a whole lot like the regulations for the establishment of a census.  Count each and every person carefully, total them up, move on to the next area or region.  Each and every single individual is tallied.  A good process for the statisticians, but what can it possibly mean to us?

In an interesting sidelight of history, one of the first duties of the United States government under the new Constitution, ratified back in 1789—the Constitution we still use, “We The People” and all that—one of the first duties on the US government was to take a census of the population, by state.  Every qualified individual in the entire country was to be counted once every decade.  Each person had to be recorded and tallied, carefully and regularly. 

This is still done, of course, and the results of the decennial census help determine everything from congressional representation to the allocation of federal funding.  Each American is counted regularly.  This tradition is so strong that even when more efficient means of tabulating populations are developed—scientific sampling, for example—the resistance is fierce.  We actually prefer to be counted in the old, archaic way, and generally speaking we still do a good job of it, in spite of the best efforts of politically motivated idiots who don’t want everyone actually counted.  The US census still really matters, and it is done, on the whole, quite well indeed.

But in the larger sense, in a nation of 340 million people, how much does one single person really matter?  There are so very many Americans; we lost 1 million people or so in the Coronavirus pandemic, an incredible tragedy—and yet, there still remain about 340 million.  And moving beyond the national, there are so many people here on earth today, nearly 8 billion people on this planet.  That’s quite a lot.  How important is it really to count everyone?

To put it another way, how much could one human life really matter? 

There are many philosophies that assert that people only matter in the collective.  They are called Socialism or Marxism; nowadays there are other variations, such as Communitarianism.  In these understandings, people only really matter as part of an aggregate whole, a member of the people’s collective, when they belong to the larger entity of which they are an otherwise insignificant member.

On the other side of the argument, in authoritarian regimes like Russia, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia or Hungary, it seems as though the only person who really matters is the dictator in charge at the moment.  Each individual only has significance in relationship to how she or he serves the president, prime minister, king, or dictator at the top of the pyramid.

Or perhaps it’s a small group of exceptional people who make a difference, not the whole group.  What is it I read once?  “It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of the zeros.” (Robert Heinlein, Glory Road, p. 277)  The sum total isn’t what matters at all; it’s the top individuals who have real impact and who stand up and deserve to be counted.  It’s the few who should be counted.

That’s not, however, the message that Bamidbar is trying to convey in this week’s accounting-influenced portion.

Judaism has always believed that each and every human life has meaning, is holy, because each of us can truly change the world.  That is, we have to count everyone—everyone—to be sure that we are considering the human value, the tzelem Elohim, the image of God encapsulated in each person.

Consider, if you will, an oddity in the text of our Siddur.  In most prayerbooks the Shema is written as it is in the book of Deuteronomy in the Torah, with the large ayin at the end of the word Shema and a large dalet at the end of the word Echad.  If you don’t believe me, turn to pages 34 and 35 in your prayerbooks.  There it is: Shema with a large ayin, echad with a large dalet.  Curious, no?

There are many interpretations as to why the ayin and dalet of these two words of our most important prayer—our must important Jewish idea of all, monotheism—are written it this way.  But the most famous, and most powerful, says that the two letters, near the beginning and at the end of the Shema, actually form a word: Eid, in Hebrew, which means witness.  The midrash tells us that the Shema itself—the holiest statement of Jewish belief, God is one—is meaningless unless we each are witnesses to its truth.  Only when each one of us accepts this phenomenal concept do we begin to understand Judaism, or indeed all ethics.  We each matter.  Everyone counts.

We will hear this same concept again tomorrow night and Sunday on the holiday of Shavu’ot, which commemorates receiving the Ten Commandments at Sinai.  After counting out each day of the 49 from Passover to Shavuot, counting the Omer—another Jewish accounting process raised to the status of holiness—we will learn that in Jewish tradition, every single Israelite human being alive stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai and heard God’s word.  And not only every Jewish human being alive back then, some 3250 years ago, but every human being not yet born, every Jew ever to be, stood at Sinai as well and experienced God’s presence.  We all, each of us, have importance because we all, each of us, stood at Sinai.

Bamidbar teaches this lesson in a much more basic way, and perhaps in an even more important way.  Because Bamidbar, this system of counting, reminds us that we each matter to our people, our nation, and, most importantly, to our God.

There is a value to this, of course, that goes beyond the theological or even the political. It is a psychological quality, a sense that if every one of us truly matters to God, and to our people of Israel, our Jewish nation, we are never truly alone.  We really do count.

I was listening to music last night and a song from the musical Dear Evan Hansen came on; the most popular song from that adolescent-focused Tony and Emmy-winning show: “You Will Be Found.”  Its theme is simple, really: when you feel alone and abandoned, like no one ever notices you, like you don’t matter at all, it’s simply not true.  As the lyric promises, “When you are broken on the ground—you will be found.”

On this Shabbat, may we each find our own way to recognize that holiness in ourselves, and in every single person we encounter.  And may we seek to build a society dedicated to recognizing that sacredness, to making certain that everyone counts.