Parashat Ba'Midbar, Numbers 1:1 - 4:20

This week’s portion, Ba’midbar (literally, in the desert) opens the penultimate book of the series of five known as the Books of Moses (or, in Hebrew, Torat Moshe).  It begins with an accurate time stamp – God speaks to Moses on the first day of the second month of the second year from the day they left Egypt – one year and one month, to the day, after the exodus.

And what concerns God on that day? The exact number – or “Numbers” as the English version provides (this is the title of the Book in English) – of the People of Israel.  In other words, God orders a census. And that brings me to a point I began talking about last week – that very little had changed between then and now.

The Census – Then & Now

By now you probably have heard (perhaps more than you wanted) about “Census 2010” – the mandatory counting by the federal government of the People of the United States.  To me, this latest census is strikingly similar to the first census ever taken – the one we read about this week in our Portion. Allow me to demonstrate.

           

i.                    The Number – 600,000

The total number of the people (and by “people” the text means only men over the age of 20 – see Numbers 1:3) counted in the first census was exactly 603,550 (Numbers 2:32).  This number is strikingly similar to the approximated number used a year before, on the day of the exodus, “approximately (“Ke”) 600,000 men, notwithstanding children.” (Exodus 12:37).

While this number is not identical to the 300 million or so Americans living in the U.S. today (ok, ok – it does not even remotely resemble it), it certainly is identical to the number of people who conduct the census in America today; or, in the words of the Census’ Director (not God, the current one): “A Note to my 600,000 New Colleagues.” (available at http://blogs.census.gov/2010census/ ).

ii.                  The Method

Today, just like the first Census, the actual counting is achieved through districting – allocating the entire lot into smaller and smaller lots, and having count each of those smaller lots until – in the aggregate – we reach the final number (see Numbers chapter one for an extremely detailed description). This may sound quite trivial today, but in my mind this is one of the very few things that we are doing today precisely the way they were conducted thousands of years ago (and with the same amount of success, I may add).

iii.                The Reason

Why a census? We all heard the “formal” reasons – a proper allocation of federal budget that is proportional (or number dependent) in nature, such as funds allocated to education, police, infrastructure, and, in fact, almost anything. There are myriad of other reasons cited on today’s census website (“Why It Is Important?” http://2010.census.gov/2010census/why/index.php ).  Yet part of the reason so many people try to evade the census’ pollsters (and the reason the Government today had to recruit 600,000 strong to do the job) is that they fear that counting all the people would provide the government with a lot of power – too much power – to govern over its citizens. Indeed, there’s a sense that knowledge is power, and absolutely accurate knowledge may lead to absolute power. I would not like to dwell into this weak version of conspiracy theory, (“weak,” counter intuitively, because it does have some factual basis) but I would love to leave it to you to draw the proper analogy with the ancient ultimate pollster entity – and the reason He was interested in the exact number.

The Prophecy: Hypothetical, Not Actual

From the census – a scientific, data-oriented, fact-based, empirical experiment, we are moving this week into the world of moral philosophy – the untested, hypothetical, purposively inaccurate realm of biblical prophecy.

This week’s Haphtarah – Hosea 2:1 – begins with a statement that is quite contradictory to the subject-matter of our portion: “And the number of the People of Israel has been like the grain of sand in the ocean, which cannot be measured and cannot be counted . . . [but God told them:] You are not my people.” I will not dwell here on the heavier conundrum posed by the text – why did God waited until the Jewish People has arrived at that number to break that news – but rather concentrate on a much more mundane question:  Why does the portion text take so much pains to reach an accurate number, while the “prophecy version” insists on a number that neither countable nor measurable?

The answer to this seemingly trivial question is actually quite deep, and stands at the heart of really understanding the nature of Jewish prophecy (and for that matter, all true prophets) over the generations.  And this true understanding can be summarized in the wonderful phrase – appearing originally in the Tosaphot (Yevamot 50, 71) and invoked countless times by Leibowitz – that “the prophet does not engage in prophecy but for the matters that are ought to be.” In other words, prophecy is prescriptive, not descriptive in nature; it tells us in which direction we should go, not in which direction we are actually going. Indeed, for thousands of years many of the prophecies written into the text did not come true – an evidence, for many, that they were wrong (or that the prophets who made them were charlatans). But rather than an evidence of incompetence of the prophets, those unsubstantiated prophecies may only serve as an evidence of our own incompetence – our own inability to live up to their desired ideals. And that, to a large extent, is the difference between the actual and the hypothetical.  

Shabbat Shalom,

Doron