Parshah Commentary

The Book of Numbers starts with, well, numbers. While the book’s Hebrew name of Bamidbar, “in the wilderness,” refers to the Israelites’ travels through the desert, the English title aptly captures the main activity of our parshah: a census. This census does not, as we might expect, count every Israelite embarking on the journey through the wilderness, but rather “every male, head by head . . . from the age of twenty years up, all those in Israel who are able to bear arms.” This is only the first of many censuses taken in the book—a phenomenon that Rashi attributes to divine love: God cares about each person and so checks in on them, one by one. But while Rashi’s reading explains the repeated censuses in Bamidbar, it opens up another question about our parshah: Why are only able-bodied men the subjects of God’s love?

While Rashi himself doesn’t wrestle with the implications of counting only this portion of the population, some of his heirs show more sensitivity to the problem in their response to an interpretation he offers elsewhere. In his commentary on the Talmud, Rashi suggests that an area qualifies as “reshut harabim”—the public domain, in which carrying is prohibited on Shabbat according to biblical law—if it contains at least 600,000 people, more or less the final count in our parshah, because this is the approximate count of “flags of the desert,” or the number of Israelites who traveled through the wilderness. (This move exemplifies the way that this figure became paradigmatic for denoting a significant quantity of people in halachah.) The medieval interpreters known as the Tosafot, who were Rashi’s students and grandchildren, raise a perhaps proto-feminist objection about Rashi’s comment: If the number of people required to qualify a space as reshut harabim is equivalent to the number of Israelites who wandered through the desert, that number included women and children, and 600,000 is thus a dramatic undercount! Still, the Tosafot resolve their quandary about defining a reshut harabim, somewhat unsatisfyingly, by saying that halachah must simply be based on the exact numbers provided in the Torah, and so we do not count more than the number of people the Torah explicitly offers.

But I wonder if we can read more deeply into this insistence that a full public is equivalent to the number of men who are able to fight. In his recent book, Perfect Victims, the Palestinian poet and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd explores “humanization,” writing powerfully about how only some Palestinian people are considered mournable by the West. “We are women and children, always,” he writes, “and if we are men, then we are frail and elderly, reiterating our nonviolence, gesturing at each other’s amputated limbs, the branches cut from our trees, more crosses to carry.” In other words, in order to be mourned, Palestinians must be, per the book’s title, “perfect victims.”

El-Kurd notes that “when eulogizing a Palestinian man . . . the colonizer’s language commands that we . . . exclude him from the ranks of our fighters . . . Obituaries like these demand that we sew the wings of angels on the Palestinian’s back, so that he will then, and only then, become mournable.” Read in the present political context, Bamidbar offers a corrective to this mode of thinking: By counting the people who might seem to be the least vulnerable, able-bodied men of fighting age, our parshah challenges us to see every person as beloved, valuable, and mournable, insisting that our care should not only be for the idealized “women and children.” Bamidbar thus gestures at something seemingly simple yet nevertheless broadly contested: God cares about every life. God is not only the God of the perfectly weak, the angelic, the photogenic sufferers. God treasures—and mourns—each one of God’s precious children, wings or not.

I wrote the first draft of this dvar Torah the day before two Israeli embassy employees were shot and killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum, a relatively new community museum that highlights the vibrant history and present of Jewish life in Washington, DC, which just opened an exhibit on local queer Jewish history that I have been excited to see. Since then, I have struggled with what to say here about this act of violence. The event is too present in my mind and in my community to omit these deaths from a conversation about mournability. And yet it seems disingenuous at best to apply El-Kurd’s words about the mournability of Palestinian life to Israeli diplomats—especially after Israel has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and as the US and Israel begin to weaponize my community’s mourning and fear to continue the killing. I can only pray that when we grieve or feel afraid, it pushes us toward hurting more deeply and turning the world upside-down—until it is unrecognizable because ongoing catastrophe is made impossible.

Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.