Numbering in the Wilderness Parshat Bamidbar June 4th, 2024, 27th of Iyyar

The Emotional Dangers of Counting: Exclusion

What are some of the emotional dangers of counting people? One is exclusion. Generally, when some people are counted, others are not counted, creating an in group and an out group. Here in our parsha, those counted are only men of a certain age, those considered yotze tzava, capable of military combat. Although such an exclusive count makes sense for a specific targeted purpose like preparing for war, there still can be damaging effects in how this exclusivity is perceived and experienced in the culture, creating a sense of who “counts,” who ultimately matters, and making some people feel left out of the “important” group, I think we can all think of times and places where we felt excluded in some way, “discounted,” on the outside of the circle of people who officially “count.” When some are counted, others are necessarily discounted and devalued.

Dr. Rachel Anisfeld. Bamidbar

https://rachelanisfeld.com/2023/05/18/essay-counted-in-love-loved-into-counting-parashat-bamidbar/

פָּקַד (v) heb

1. • v
   • to attend to, muster, number, reckon, visit, punish, appoint, look after, care for
     • (Qal)
       • to pay attention to, observe
       • to attend to
       • to seek, look about for
       • to seek in vain, need, miss, lack
       • to visit
       • to visit upon, punish
       • to pass in review, muster, number
       • to appoint, assign, lay upon as a charge, deposit
     • (Niphal)
       • to be sought, be needed, be missed, be lacking
       • to be visited
       • to be visited upon
       • to be appointed
       • to be watched over

The book of Numbers is a narrative of great sadness, in which the midbar, the wilderness, swallows up all the aspirations of a generation-- people who experienced the Exodus, the Revelation at Sinai, and the creation of a sanctuary for God. ..... The tale of numbers... indicates both continuity and rupture, yielding an implicit narrative of catastrophe. In this sense, the book is well named Numbers, as though to indicate the tragic irony of altered expectations. Aviva Zornberg, Bewilderments, 2015.

An explication of the Daat Moshe by Mark Kirschenbaum:

1. This lofty spiritual transmission is delivered via "echad lachodesh hasheni", literally "the first of the second month", but here, echad, "one" is famously the numerical equivalent of ahava, of love (the letters add up to thirteen, and it is an important meditation when reciting the Shema prayer, for example). It is through love that chidush, hitchadshut, renewal, is consummated, love renews the hearts of the people, because love means the care for the spiritual state of the sheni, of the Other. Love for the Other brings about a spiritual renewal so dramatic that it can transform even time, even time that has passed; the years of the spiritual poverty brought about by the hegemony of Egypt are now "b'shana hashenit", shenit (second) being similar to the term hishtanut, transfiguration; even the past gets a second chance and is reconstructed in holiness.

2. As an alternative reading to the latter part of the verse, he also suggests that "b'echad lachodesh hasheni" could insinuate that like the Echad, a term which is also a descriptive name for Gd, through Gd the uniquely One, who we are taught "each day mechadesh, recreates with His goodness", one can become a "mishneh", Gd's aide-de-camp, in reconstructing the world toward the good, in tikkun olam. This can be accomplished by "shana hashenit". Shana numerically is equivalent to "sefira", similar to the Hebrew word "sapir", "sapphire", which glows from within itself (in other places the period of Sefirat HaOmer is thought of as a way to achieve an inner "glow"). Thus, one who is enlightened, through his or her own light, can bring about this same "shinui", renewal, in others; this shinui is a result of each individual's exodus from their own "metzarim", those gnawing inhibitions which keep one from manifesting their own greatest potential.

The Daat Moshe was a hasidic master, Rabbi Moshe Elyakim Beriah Hopsztayn of Kozienice (1757-1828). His posthumously published work was entitled Daat Moshe (Lemberg, 1879).

From, Mark Kirschenbaum, Bamidbar, Tikkun Magazine,

(from a longer passage where the view of the Daat Moshe is explicated)

https://www.tikkun.org/perashat-bamidbar/

"Like a Wilderness"

Only when you are "like a wilderness" are you ready to have God's presence rest upon you and merit the light of Torah. "Like a wilderness" means that you have not yet been touched by human hands, that you have never been cultivated or planted, that you must rely on your own strength, as in the teaching, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" (Mishnah Avot 1:14).

Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk

Itturei Torah [Hebrew], vol. 5, by Aharon Yaakov Greenberg [Tel Aviv: Yavneh, 1996], p. 9

Wandering Word of God

Edmund Jabes, Excerpted from, The Question of Displacement into Lawfulness.

Wandering Word of God. It was for its echo the word of the wandering people. No oasis for it, no shade, no peace, only the vast and thirsty desert, only the book of this thirst. ....

For after all, why is it in the desert that God chose to speak? And what is the desert if not a place denied its place, an absent place, a non-place?

And who is this God who, ashamed of having served time as a local deity, suddenly wanted to be invisible, indulged in an unpronounceable name and through His and His name's transparency made the universe His Kingdom?

So that He is where He is not and is not where He is because He is at the same time here and everywhere, because here is always only the beginning of elsewhere, and because being everywhere means abolishing place in favor of all places.

Being nowhere or everywhere nearly comes to the same thing.....

If God chose to speak in the desert, was it not to make all words His own, all words but an echo of His? And can we infer that silence is forever the echo of a first silence, that of the divine Word perceived at its borders of oblivion? As if only oblivion were audible? Thus the desert acquires a significance to which we will have to pay some attention.

The desert is pulverized words of men, countries, scattered people, words which once were swooped down on by an incomparable celestial word so disturbing that the Hebrew people first refused it, forcing Moses to break the Tables of the Law. And if, in order to be understood by the creature, God's Word and commandments had to burst into pieces so that the pieces could make it perceptible, that is human. As if, besides, it were only through formless fragments, only through its infinite fracture that we can approach the Totality........

Edmond Jabès (April 16, 1912– Paris, January 2, 1991) was a French writer and poet of Egyptian origin, and one of the best known literary figures writing in French after World War II.

Counted in Love

Maybe you can imagine a large circle of dancers all across the earth. Notice the times and the ways you have on occasion felt excluded, disconnected, separated from this circle, notice that feeling of separation, and feel how, through God’s view of you as a precious star, you are returned into the circle of belonging. Maybe on the human plane it is only men of a certain age who get counted, but not on the divine plane. On the divine plane, we are each loved back into the circle, each a being created betzelem elokim “in the divine image,” each of us embraced so fully that our sense of our own mattering helps us return to the circle from which we were excluded, helps us open ourselves to re-engaging and joining hands once again. God counts us with love, and in so doing, restores our sense of intrinsic value and returns us to the circle, to the web, to connection and love on earth, too. We are loved into counting, both as separate entities and as integral members of the whole. We are part of the divine minyan, the divine count. When the counting is done out of love, no one stands outside.

Dr. Rachel Anisfeld. Bamidbar

https://rachelanisfeld.com/2023/05/18/essay-counted-in-love-loved-into-counting-parashat-bamidbar/

Resources:

• Mark Kirschenbaum, Parshat Bamidbar, Tikkun Magazine, May 31st, 2011 https://www.tikkun.org/perashat-bamidbar/

• Zornberg, Aviva, Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, Publisher. Schocken. February 24, 2015.