Parshah Commentary

This past Tisha B’av, a fast day that is traditionally spent contemplating the unrelenting catastrophe of human history, I opened up Raul Hilberg’s formidable 1961 tome The Destruction of the European Jews, which attempts to determine “how the Jews of Europe were destroyed.” Not “why”—that question is summarily dealt with in the first chapter—but “how.” How was it logistically possible to coordinate a crime of such scale, a project that earlier generations of Jew-haters could only have imagined? The answer begins with a census. The earliest stages of the Holocaust, in Hilberg’s account, were not the thuggish acts of brownshirt intimidation, nor the mob violence of Kristallnacht, both of which he dismisses as atavistic. Rather, he attributes the foundation of mass murder to the humdrum bureaucracy responsible for classifying and counting every Jew, their family, and their property. “In 1933 the Jews were almost completely emancipated and almost completely integrated into the German community,” Hilberg writes. “The severance of Jew from German was consequently a very complex operation,” one undertaken by “an administrative apparatus” centuries in the making. It was this state machinery, capable of a complete accounting of the population, that transmuted the perennial pogroms of Christendom into a genocidal project.

This week’s parshah, Bamidbar, begins with a census that likewise prepares the ground for the destruction of an entire generation of Jews. The Israelites, of course, were not systematically annihilated—but those emancipated from Egyptian slavery were doomed to live out the rest of their days in the prison of the desert. One midrashic tradition explicitly connects the complete accounting of the people with their grim fate. Interpreting the idiom “raise their head,” used in our parshah to refer to taking a census, the midrash comments: “It is like one who says to the executioner, ‘Take that one’s head.’” What seems to be an assessment of each tribe’s military capability turns out to be a macabre list of the damned.

This reading is just one small piece of a robust Jewish tradition of viewing the seemingly innocuous activity of counting people with trepidation. In Shemot, a census is undertaken via the proxy of a half-shekel tax, so as to avoid contracting a mysterious plague. According to the Tamudic sages Rabbi Yitzhak and Rabbi Elazar, it is forbidden to count the Jewish people when God has not explicitly mandated doing so; after all, the Israelites were promised the innumerability of all the stars of the heavens and the sand of the sea. Even today, many Jews will count those gathered for a minyan, for example, by using the words of a Biblical verse with ten words, rather than counting each person with a number.

But what is the reason for this prohibition? Rashi warns that the evil eye is attracted to counted things. Thus the half-shekel is a kind of lightning rod that draws bad energy away from the people. This is why, Rashi explains, King David’s unsanctioned census provoked a deadly plague that claimed 70,000 lives. Taken toward the end of his reign, despite the protests of Yoav, King David’s general and right-hand man, the census is one of the stains on his kingship. By Rashi’s account, it seems that King David failed to use a proxy counter and thus exposed the people to the evil eye. The Ramban, however, finds it unlikely that King David would make that mistake. He explains that a core part of King David’s failure was that there was no pressing rationale: “There was no war, and he had no purpose for the people, he simply wished to gladden his heart in ruling over a large nation.”

The Ramban’s approach sheds light on another problem with the census—it can be used to abuse power and usurp divine knowledge. Counting a population is a seductive but dangerous act that arrogantly seeks comprehensive understanding of a people, something that is only possible for God. An all-knowing God perceives the population as a whole without losing sight of the individuals that compose it; the military commander is an oft-cited mortal counterpart for this mode of knowledge-as-power. The ideal commander knows both the aggregate capacity of his fighting force and the strengths and weaknesses of each individual who composes it. This ideal was exemplified by the legendary Cyrus, king of Persia, who could reel off by memory the names of all his soldiers. But a commander only knows what is relevant to combat, and even that is imperfectly known. When King David counts his people during peacetime, it is a Babel-esque assault on God’s domain—and an act of hubris.

In the age of the modern state, we count whole populations as a matter of course, with many goals, some perfectly benign. Taxation, providing welfare, determining electoral districts, and many more state functions are all the product of population-level data. But counting and naming also still serve the angel of death, determining who is available to kill, whose life is meaningless. As +972 Magazine first reported two years ago, the apparently indiscriminate killing of the early months of the Gaza genocide was actually a calculated endeavor. Population-level data was collected through mass surveillance, and an AI algorithm ranked everyone in the database on a one to 100 scale of likelihood of being a combatant—the census as kill list. Here, human soldiers wielded the godlike power to kill from the sky, with total disregard for the scale of mortality. In this sense, Nazi innovations in exterminatory knowledge have been updated for the 21st century by none other than the state their victims established. Like the Israelites in the desert, this is not a generation that will see the promised land.

Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.