Parshah Commentary

Parshat Bamidbar

This week’s parshah, which opens the fourth of the Torah’s five books, begins with a new command to Moses: to count the Israelites. This explains the book’s English name, Numbers, related to the rabbis’ title, Sefer HaPikudim (the Book of Counting). In fact, the book is bracketed by censuses—one in our parshah, in the second year after leaving Egypt as the Israelites prepare to enter the land, and one 39 years later, as their children finally reach it. But in Hebrew, the book has a different name, drawn from its first significant word, Bamidbar, meaning “in the wilderness.”

These two names represent two opposing relational paradigms. With Bamidbar, the rabbinic understanding of the wilderness emphasizes its vastness, linking this desolate open space with the boundlessness of selfhood and of interpersonal devotion. A midrash in Bamidbar Rabbah notices that the Torah’s frequent formulation of “God spoke to Moses saying” is altered in the opening verse of our parshah, which adds an extra detail: “God spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai.” The midrash suggests that the verse specifically references the location in which these commandments were given in order to teach us that Torah is only acquired by one who renders themselves hefker, ownerless, like the wilderness. In the Peri HaAretz, R. Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk says this indicates a need for the Torah learner “to be completely nullified before their friend, and it is through this that they become united and bound up one with the other.” Another midrash proposes that the specific place is mentioned as a gesture of intimacy: Detailing time and location is a halachic requirement of a ketubah, and so these details are included in our verse to constitute a marriage contract with God. The imagery linking the wilderness and belovedness is also invoked by God in the book of Jeremiah, when recalling “the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed Me in the wilderness, in a land not sown.”

A census, on the other hand, is about the quantifiable and the delineated; it is a precise, logistical undertaking, typically associated with military endeavors or taxation. Indeed, the counting that takes place in our parshah is specifically of men over the age of 20 who would be capable of bearing arms in the impending conquest of the land of Israel. The 600,000 Israelites so often cited as wandering through the desert is in fact less than half of the population.

The rabbis, perhaps in an attempt to harmonize these two approaches, suggest that God so frequently counts us because we are so beloved. The censuses are like a shepherd counting his flock, or a jeweler counting her pearls. While there’s a tenderness to these images, they can also feel lacking: If counting is an act of love, what does it mean that only the portion of the population deemed useful is counted? What does it mean that we, as human beings, are compared to mere sheep or jewels—prized possessions rather than partners?

Over the past months, we’ve seen people use numbers both to track the devastation in Gaza and, cynically and cruelly, to question or minimize it. We’ve seen people ask how many deaths are “acceptable.” The answer, of course, is none. Such arguments rely upon notions of people as quantifiable data, as calculable value and calculable loss. The gemara in Bava Metzia, building off a verse in Devarim, suggests that blessing is found only in that which is not measured or counted, because as soon as something has been precisely calculated, it’s related to not as abundant bountifulness but as an asset to be had or lost. (Notably, the census of men in our parshah is the very metric used to determine those who will die in the desert following the sin of the spies.) This means that even counting something infinitely valuable makes its loss explicable, a mere number to be grasped.

In describing a redeemed future in the haftarah for this week’s parshah, the prophet Hosea declares, “The number of the people of Israel shall be like that of the sands of the sea, which cannot be measured or counted; and instead of being told, ‘You are Not-My-People,’ they shall be called Children-of-the-Living-God.” Our uncountability goes hand-in-hand with a relational orientation to God, rather than an objectification. For all the fondness reflected in the midrashim about God counting us as precious items, they feel insufficient for modeling a mutual relationship. But in the matching of our parshah with its haftarah, the God of pearls is purposefully wed to the God of Hosea, the precision of numbering to the immeasurability of devotion. Perhaps the pairing invites us to hold the affectionate exactitude of enumeration, with its regard for the particularity of each individual, and to pursue the mundane but necessary work of evaluating our own capacity, all while cultivating a world in which neither life nor loss are quantifiable—where intimacy and sanctity emerge from our boundless, intertwined selves.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and anti-occupation activist based in Jerusalem.