Parshas Bamidbar
The Significance of Each Tribe's Count
The parsha of this week, and certain portions of this particular Chumash as
a whole, deals with the counting of the people of Israel. The traditional
Jewish commentators always saw the repeated counting of the Jewish people,
that we see in the desert as recorded in the Torah and later in the Land of
Israel as well, as a sign of love. People always count and check up on their
important assets, whether familial, social or financial.
Everyone checks on their financial portfolios and so to speak counts their
money. This is such an inborn natural trait that the halacha, when it wishes
to describe the necessary attention and care due to the recitation of the
words of our prayer services, compares this level of care “as though one was
counting one’s money coins.”
Naturally, counting people is far different than counting money or other
inanimate objects. Every human being is different than anyone else. Our
fingerprints and DNA are unique to ourselves as are our opinions, thoughts,
character traits and behavior patterns. It is therefore imperative that the
Lord alone order and supervise the count of the Jewish people. A purely
human count will not truly reveal the diversity and human qualities embedded
in the cold numbers that jump from the printed page of the Chumash.
Perhaps this is the message that Jewish tradition tells us when it warns us
humans not to count people coldly and statistically purely by number lest a
plague of troubles follow such a count. Counting people as identical
creatures and thinking of them in that fashion always brings about troubles
and tragedies both in personal lives and in national Jewish life as well.
Much is made of the disparity in numbers between the individual tribes of
Israel. Some of the tribes have a very large population while others are
relatively small in number. While the simple surface explanations to this
phenomenon have to do with demographic patterns within families and groups,
the rabbis always searched for deeper spiritual and supernatural reasons for
these disparities.
Much of this can be traced to the relative hardships that each of the
individual tribes suffered during the centuries of Egyptian slavery and
persecution. The tribe of Levi was pretty much exempted from the true
horrors of Egyptian persecution - therefore, the blessing of the Torah that
“the greater the persecution, the more those Jews became more numerous.”
The tribe of Shimon still suffered from criticism of their behavior and
their undue aggressiveness by their father regarding the incidents of
Shechem and Yosef. Therefore their numbers were always small and the tribe
itself as an independent entity practically ceased to exist after the Jewish
people established themselves in the Land of Israel.
The blessings of Yaakov to Yosef and the favored position of Yosef and his
rise to power vis a vis his brothers enabled the combined numbers of the
tribes of Menashe and Efrayim to far surpass those of any of the other
tribes of Israel. Apparently many lessons and much guidance is tucked away
within the seemingly dry numbers that are recorded in this week’s parsha.
Shabat shalom,
Rabbi Berel Wein
