Naso נשא
Continuing the preparations for the Israelites’ journey from Sinai to the holy land, Parashat Naso contains a melange of subjects whose inner connection is not immediately obvious: the roles of two of the Levitical clans, Gershon and Merari, the census of the Levites as a group, rules about the purity of the camp, the law of the sota (the woman suspected of adultery), the Nazirite, and the priestly blessing. The parasha concludes with a lengthy and repetitive account of the offerings brought by the tribes at the dedication of the Tabernacle.
The first of the following essays is about the nature of a census in Jewish law and thought. The second looks at a striking feature of the book of Numbers as a whole, its emphasis on the tribes as distinct entities: Why does the Torah focus on this internal division within the nation rather than focusing on the nation as a unified whole? The third explores attitudes within the tradition to the Nazirite, the individual who voluntarily accepted a higher-than-usual standard of personal holiness. The fourth is about the priestly blessings, one of Judaism’s oldest liturgies. The fifth advances a theory about the underlying logic of the various aspects of the parasha as a whole.
What Counts?
Parashat Naso begins with a continuation of the census that gives the entire book its English name, “Numbers,” itself based on the old rabbinic name, Ḥomesh HaPekudim, the book of “counting” or “numbering.” Not only does the book begin with a census, it contains a second one towards the end (ch. 26). The difference between them is one generation. As we will read in the episode of the spies, it was the demoralisation of the people at that point that led to the decree that, with only two exceptions, those who had left Egypt would not enter the Promised Land. It would be their children, born in freedom, who would have that privilege and responsibility.
What is puzzling is the fact that the tradition seems to have two different, seemingly contradictory, attitudes towards the taking of a census. Rashi notes that this is not the first time the people had been counted. Their number (“about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children”) had already been given as they prepared to leave Egypt (Ex. 12:37). A more precise calculation had been made when the adult males each gave a half shekel towards the building of the Sanctuary (yielding a total of 603,550; Ex. 38:26). In Numbers, a third and fourth count took place. Why so often? Rashi’s answer is simple and moving:
Because they [the Children of Israel] are dear to Him, God counts them often. He counted them when they were about to leave Egypt. He counted them after the Golden Calf to establish how many were left. And now that He was about to cause His presence to rest on them [with the inauguration of the Sanctuary], He counted them again. (Rashi to Num. 1:1)
For Rashi, the counting of the people was an act of divine love. Yet this is not the impression we receive elsewhere. To the contrary, the Torah sees the taking of a census as profoundly dangerous: “Then God said to Moses, ‘When you take a census of the Israelites to count them, each must give to God a ransom for his life at the time he is counted. Then no plague will come on them when you number them’” (Ex. 30:11–12).
Without the ransom, the verse implies, a plague may come. Rashi explains that there is a danger of “the evil eye.”1There are many other explanations given by the commentators. The simplest, given by Ibn Ezra and Ḥizkuni, is that a census was usually taken in the ancient world for military purposes, to know the size of the army a nation might deploy. Hence it was an act that reminded people that, in the course of combat, they might die.
Centuries later, against the advice of his army commander Joab, King David took a census of the people. There was divine anger, and seventy thousand died. David himself expressed contrition, saying, “I have sinned greatly in what I have done. Now, Lord, I beg You, take away the guilt of Your servant. I have done a very foolish thing.”2II Sam. 24:1–17; see also I Chr. 21:1–17.
It is hard to reconcile the idea of counting as an act of love with the fact that it involves risk and divine displeasure.
The solution to this seeming contradiction lies in the unusual phrase the Torah uses, here and in the previous parasha, to describe the act of counting: naso or se’u et rosh, literally, “lift the head.” There were several other verbs available in classical Hebrew to indicate the act of counting: limnot, lifkod, lispor, laḥshov. Why, in the books of Exodus and Numbers, does the Torah resort to the strange circumlocution, “lift the heads” of the Israelites?
In the ancient world, and to some extent still today, a census represented the principle that there is power in numbers. Specifically, counting the people was a way of knowing the size of the army a nation could muster. It also determined its capacity to build monumental buildings like the Tower of Babel spoken about in Genesis, or the giant pyramid of Giza, undertaken by Pharaoh Khufu around 2500 BCE, before even the birth of Abraham. In such a world, with the exception of the ruler and the elite, life was cheap. The sages said about the Tower of Babel that if a person fell and died, no one noticed. If a brick fell, they wept.3Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 24.
Size meant strength, military or economic. Life was measured in the mass.
The religion of Israel is a principled protest against this view. At this distance in time it is hard fully to appreciate the transformative potential of a single radical idea: that the human person as such, man or woman, rich or poor, powerful or powerless, is the image of God and therefore of non-negotiable, unquantifiable value. We are each equally in the image of God, therefore we stand equal in the presence of God. Much of Torah, Jewish history, and the trajectory of Western civilisation – what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the arc of history” – is about the slow translation of this idea into institutions, social structures, and moral codes.
It should now be clear why taking a census is fraught with spiritual risk and why God was angry with King David for doing so. The biblical text says that he told Joab, “Go throughout the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beersheba and enrol the fighting men so that I may know how many there are.”4II Sam. 24:2; I Chr. 21:2.
Joab instinctively knew that this was wrong and said so, but was overruled. David had fallen into the trap of thinking the way other nations did: that population means power and size equals strength.
David, Israel’s second king, laid the foundations of a nation. He waged successful wars, united the tribes, and established Jerusalem as his capital. Shortly after his death, Israel reached its zenith as a power in the Middle East. Under Solomon, through strategic alliances, it became a centre of trade and scholarship. The Temple was built. It must have seemed at the time as if, after many centuries of wandering and war, Israel had become a power to rival any other.
It was a short-lived, cruelly-shattered illusion. Almost immediately after Solomon’s reign, the kingdom split in two, and from then on, its this-worldly fate was sealed. A history of defeats, exiles, and destructions began, one which has no parallel in the annals of any other nation. The Hebrew Bible is not wrong in seeing the starting point of this decline in the moment at which David acted like any other king and ordered a census of the people.
The numbering of a people is the most potent symbol of mankind-in-the-mass, of a society in which the individual is not valued in and for him- or herself but as part of a totality. That is precisely what Israel was not. God set His special love on a people who never sought to become an empire and never waged war to convert populations to its faith. Israel’s strength had nothing to do with numbers. It was and still is tiny both in absolute terms and relative to its surrounding empires.
There is a remarkable demonstration of this in the book of Judges. God tells Gideon to wage war against the Midianites. He assembles a force of 32,000 men. God then says to Gideon: “You have too many men. I cannot deliver Midian into their hands, or Israel would boast against Me, ‘My own strength has saved me’” (Judges 7:2). He instructs Gideon to tell the soldiers that whoever wants to leave may leave. Twenty-two thousand do so. He is left with ten thousand men. God tells him that this is still too many. He instructs him to test how the soldiers drink water from the river. Three hundred pass the test by not kneeling down. God tells Gideon to dismiss the rest, “With the three hundred men…I will save you and give the Midianites into your hands” (Judges 7:1–8).
This idea is fundamental to Judaism. In Greek thought and throughout the European Enlightenment, what mattered were universals. In Judaism, what matter to God are individuals. There is a fine verse in Psalms (147:4) which says that God “counts the number of the stars and calls them each by name.” A name is a marker of uniqueness. Collective nouns group things together; proper names distinguish them as individuals. Only what we value do we name. (One of the most chilling acts of dehumanisation in the extermination camps of Nazi Germany was that those who entered were never addressed by their names. Instead they were given, inscribed on their skin, a number.) God gives even the stars their names. All the more so does this apply to human beings, on whom He has set His image. When God calls, He calls our name,5Often twice. See Gen. 22:11; 46:2; Ex. 3:4. to which the reply is simply, “Hineni,” “Here I am.” God – one and alone – meets us, one and alone, endowing us with a significance that cannot be quantified or measured by a census.
This idea is deeply internalised in Judaism. So when Moses asked God to appoint a successor, he used an unusual phrase, “Lord, God of the spirits of all flesh” (Num. 27:16). The sages interpreted this to mean, “God, You know how different people are from one another. Therefore appoint for them a leader who is able to relate to each according to his character.”6Midrash Tanḥuma, Parashat Pinḥas 11.
The rabbis instituted a blessing to be said on seeing a crowd of 600,000: “Blessed be He…who discerns secrets.”7Berakhot 58a and Rashi ad loc.
This means, says Rashi, that God knows what makes each of us an individual, unique. What makes this blessing so powerful is that most of us, on seeing a crowd of 600,000 people, would lose a sense of individuality. They become a mass, a crowd.8See on this Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).
That is not how we should see a crowd, imply the sages. We should never forget that each is different, each a universe, each a distinctive fragment of the Divine.
We can now resolve the seeming contradiction between the counting that is a gesture of divine love, and the counting that is fraught with danger. It is the difference between a census commanded by God and one undertaken by a human being who assumes that there is strength in numbers. That is why the Torah does not use any of the normal verbs for counting – limnot, lifkod, lispor, laḥshov – and instead uses the circumlocution, “lift the head.” This means that those entrusted with the task are commanded to lift the spirits of those they count, making each individual stand tall in the knowledge that he is loved, cherished, held special by God, and not merely a number, a cipher, among the thousands and millions.
There is a powerful reflection on the Mourner’s Kaddish, by the hasidic teacher Rabbi Simha Bunim of Przysucha (Poland, 1765–1827):
In the ordinary world, when a small unit of a large army is lost, the loss is not felt, and it is not until an entire division is missing that the depletion must be corrected and the army must be reinforced. It is otherwise, however, in the army of God. If only a single Jew is missing, then there is already a lack in the greatness and holiness of God. Therefore, we pray that “His name be magnified and sanctified,” that is, that His blessed name may be made complete for what it has lost with the disappearance of the deceased.9Quoted in Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish (London: Picador, 1999), 24.
That perhaps is why Jews have always been a tiny people. As Moses said, “The Lord did not set His affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples” (Deut. 7:7). The emphasis on the absolute worth of the individual-as-individual, coming more naturally to a small people than to a vast empire, is living testimony to the difference it makes to believe in the One God who endows each of us in our oneness with His image. God “lifts our head” in the most profound way known to humankind, by assuring each of us of His special, enduring, unquantifiable love.
That is the nature of the censuses in the book of Numbers. As the Israelites prepared to become a society with the Divine Presence at its centre, they had to be reminded that they were to become the pioneers of a new social order, whose most famous definition was given by the prophet Zechariah (4:6): “Not by might, nor by strength, but by My spirit, says the Lord.”