I am someone who is good with numbers. I did well in math as a kid. But I’m bad with spacial relations. I know how to measure out and calculate the area of a room. I can compute the volume of a cylinder or a cube or a cone. But I can’t look at a room and tell you how many square feet, or something in the distance and tell you how many blocks.
My co-parent Anne is unlike me in this respect. She is particularly gifted in spacial relations and thinks multi-dimensionally She can look at what’s left in the mason jar of kasha, go to the bulk section at Oliver’s, and return with exactly the number of grains needed to fill the jar up evenly to the rim.
I suspect more people are like me: hard to see in three dimensions based on numbers on paper, whether those numbers are data, measurements, or statistics. We might understand the numbers on the paper perfectly, but still not fully grasp the truth of what they represent.
This is the tricky business evident in this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tisa, in which God commands a census of the Israelites. This census is done not by counting people directly but by counting coins. Each Israelite somehow comes up with a silver half-shekel. The coins are collected and tallied, and that sum is equivalent to the number of people. There are really two outcomes of this census: a windfall of money for the administration, and a numerical figure. A sum. A number. No more information than that. Unlike an American census, upon which so many of us family history buffs rely and even dote, there are no names collected, no relationships, addresses, ages or occupations. Each Israelite who is counted dissolves into a piece of data –– a costly silver piece of data at that.
So why this counting of coins instead of just counting the people?
Our sages say it was done this way because it is forbidden to count Jews. In Talmud Yoma 22b the rabbis review a verse in Hoshea (2:1) that goes like this:
וְֽ֠הָיָה מִסְפַּ֤ר בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵל֙ כְּח֣וֹל הַיָּ֔ם אֲשֶׁ֥ר לֹֽא־יִמַּ֖ד וְלֹ֣א יִסָּפֵ֑ר
“The number of the People of Israel shall be like the sands of the sea, which cannot be measured or counted...”
On its face, this verse is a typical prophecy about how numerous we would one day become. But the rabbis saw in the phrase “which cannot be measured or counted” not a boast but a prohibition on measuring and counting the People of Israel. And they point for support to other passages where we see Israelites being counted by their sheep, or the priests holding out a finger and letting their fingers only be counted. By interpreting Hoshea this way, the rabbis of the Talmud launch a longstanding prohibition on counting Jews.
This prohibition forced some creativity, because sometimes you just need to count people. I’ve been in synagogues in observant communities where a minyan was needed. Instead of doing a headcount – one, two, three, four – they used a 10-word verse from Psalms:
הוֹשִׁ֤יעָה ׀ אֶת־עַמֶּ֗ךָ וּבָרֵ֥ךְ אֶת־נַחֲלָתֶ֑ךָ וּֽרְעֵ֥ם וְ֝נַשְּׂאֵ֗ם עַד־הָעוֹלָֽם׃
“Deliver and bless Your people; tend and sustain them forever.” (Psalms 28:9)
You would recite this verse, looking word by word at each person in the room successively. If you reach the end of the verse, you had your minyan and could start praying.
When I was in my twenties, I got to spend a lot of time with my then-boyfriend’s grandmother. Grandma Margaret, a multi-lingual Slovakian transplant to St. Louis, certainly could do numbers. She and her husband had successfully operated a grocery in Pittsburgh and then one in St. Louis. But when she was counting out, say, who was coming over for dinner, she would tick off in her mind the roster of guests, saying, “Not-one, not-two, not-three.”
This same practice showed up at Ner Shalom’s Yiddish Tish this week. We were reading from Sholem Aleichem’s novel, Motl in America. The protagonist, a 9-year old immigrant boy, is being asked by officials at Ellis Island how many friends his family had in the United States. Motl begins naming and describing each: Yoyneh der beker, a Yid a kasn. Er is nit-eyns. “Yonah the baker, an angry man. He is not-one.” Zayn vayb Riveh di bekerin, a Yidine mit a retonde, iz nit-tzvey. “His wife Riva the baker, a woman with a nice coat, is not-two.”
When Grandma Margaret would count people that way, she had her own reasons, seemingly unrelated to Talmudic prohibitions. For her, counting your loved ones, your family, your friends was a delicate matter that could arouse the Evil Eye, tempting it to take someone away and undo your boastful count.
I suspect that her view of why we don’t count people is at least as old as Talmud if not older. Because the feel of it – of the fear of imminent loss – is right there in this week’s Torah portion itself, in the census instructions. The coin that each Israelite hands over is not just a marker for counting. It is explicitly a gift to God to ward off plague. This is a method of counting by proxy that also attempts to avoid calamity. Perhaps it is a recognition of our human frailty – that no sooner do we count ourselves than we notice our extreme vulnerability and ephemerality in this life and this world. And thus the inherent bravery implied in the phrase “stand up and be counted.”
One participant at Yiddish Tish, reading the “not-one, not-two” piece of the Sholem Aleichem story, said that she knew of this custom, but understood it to be a practice born of the idea that we are not numbers. No human is a number.
This feels like a rather modern read of the custom. But still, an important insight. We are humans, and how often do we get treated as numbers? A number is a nearly indecent reduction of the human experience. Reduction to a number is, for instance, how the American public can know that over a half-million Americans have died of COVID in a year and still feel disconnected from the immensity of this loss.
During the early years of the AIDS crisis, when the nation was ignoring the mounting death toll from the disease, San Francisco activist Cleve Jones came up with the idea of a memorial in the form of a life-size quilt, made up of large fabric panels. Each panel, sewn by a loved one or a volunteer, would give the name of someone who had died of AIDS, and the decoration would communicate something of who they were. The dimensions of the panel – 3x6 – were roughly the size of a body or a grave. When the Quilt was first displayed in Washington DC in October of 1987 – and I was there that day – there were at that time (only) 1,920 panels. And yet it filled an area on the Capitol Mall larger than a football field.
The Names Project Quilt remained one of the most visible symbols of the devastation of those years. It did so by undoing the counting. By restoring human dimensions to what otherwise were inconceivable and thus ignorable statistics. The AIDS Quilt gently and firmly insisted: “We are not-one, not-two.”
Maybe Torah understands this tension. To count, no matter how high you count, is to reduce. Nonetheless, sometimes we must. Grandma Margaret needed to know how many plates, forks and servings. But the number 8 was no substitute for the 8 living, laughing, people gathered around for dinner.
I invite you to look down now next to where it says “Participants” on your Zoom window. Notice that it says 74. And be impressed for just a moment at how many people are here: 74 Zoom windows, many containing more than one person. And now draw your focus to the top of your Zoom window and switch to “Gallery View.” Look at the faces, and think, “Not-74.” And if you’re not certain of your math, count for yourself: “Not-one, not-two, not-three.”
Gratitude to Yiddish Tish participants Clara Adam in Toronto and Roy Mitchell in Anchorage for their insights on this topic.