"Take a census of the whole Israelite community..." (Numbers 1:2)
Last month Americans filled out their own census forms as part of the U.S. census taken every ten years. The data from the census has many practical implications, including the number of members of the House of Representatives each state will have and federal government allocations for such things as education, welfare, and infrastructure. It also helps the government understand the nature of our family configurations and health status so that it knows who we are as a nation and how to plan for our future.
The census required in this week's Torah reading may well have had similar, pragmatic purposes. After all, Moses was preparing the Israelites to wage wars against the Canaanite peoples, with some of those battles described later in the Book of Numbers, which we begin reading this week. Any good general needs to know how many soldiers he has. And indeed, Chapter 2 of Numbers describes just where each and every tribe was to position itself as they moved forward toward conquering the land. The priests and levites also had to be counted, for even if they did not participate personally in battle, their religious functions were seen as directly relevant to a good relationship with God and therefore to the chances of triumph.
In the Haftarah for this week, however, Hosea talks about the numbers of Israelites in a very different, theological context:
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." (Hosea 2:1)
This, of course, hearkens back to the promise made to Abraham (Genesis 15:5; 17:3-6) and repeated to the other Patriarchs that the People Israel would be as numerous as the stars in the heavens and the sands of the sea (e.g., Genesis 22:17; 26:4; 32:13; Exodus 32:13), metaphors repeated in later books of the Bible (e.g., 2 Samuel 17:11; 1 Kings 4:20; Isaiah 10:22; 48:19; Jeremiah 33:22; Nehemiah 9:23). Deuteronomy (1:10; 10:22; 28:62) asserts that by the time of Moses the Israelites were already as numerous as the stars in the heavens and that one of the punishments for disobeying God would be that the Israelites would become a small people in place of the large one that they had become. Here the large size of the people is a sign of God's blessing, for it testifies to the fact that the Children of Israel are following God's commandments and therefore can properly be known, as Hosea says here, as "Children-of-the-Living-God." In such a time, each of us would count not only for the pragmatic needs of the community, but as an important member of the team engaged in advancing God's plan to serve as a holy people dedicated to fixing the world.
In our own day, the promises are unfulfilled, and Deuteronomy's assertions of our large size are simply false. Christians represent a full 33% of the world's population; Muslims are 20%; and Jews, including not only those who are Jewish by the definition of Jewish law but also anyone who identifies as a Jew, are just over 13 million, or 0.2%. We all are deservedly proud of the contributions Jews have made toward the betterment of our world, even with the few numbers we now have; but we are endangering our ability to survive as a people, let alone fulfill our God-given mission, through the ever-diminishing numbers of our people. This means that each Jew is precious, each Jews counts, not only as a person created in God's image or as a member of the community, but as part of the Jewish Covenant with God.
We therefore must fight hard to keep Jews within the Jewish fold. We are simply much too small a community to lose anyone through assimilation or conversion to another religion.
We must also procreate beyond our current rates. Even setting aside the third of our numbers whom we lost in the Holocaust, with a reproductive rate in North America of something between 1.7 and 1.8, we are not even replacing ourselves. As a rabbi, I surely understand that we have to do a lot of educational work to transform a child born Jewish into an informed and practicing Jewish adult; but you cannot educate children who do not exist. Therefore, it seems to me that, with the major exception of people who cannot have children and who are therefore exempt from this commandment, the very first commandment mentioned in the Torah - to be fruitful and multiply - is *the* most important of the commandments for Jews in our time.
Rabbi Kassel Abelson and I wrote a rabbinic ruling adopted by the Conservative Movement's Committee on Law and Standards, entitled "Mitzvah Children" (www.rabbinicalassembly.org, under the link "Contemporary Halakhah.). In it we stress that we definitely do not want to add to the emotional burden of infertile couples in saying this, that like all people who cannot fulfill a commandment, they are exempt from this one, but that they may want to consider adoption as a time-honored option within the Jewish tradition. We, however, urge Jews who can have children to have three or four, including one more than they were planning on having for the sake of the Jewish people. Singles and gay and lesbian Jewish adults should seriously consider having children as well, whether through some of the new techniques to assist reproduction or through adoption. At the same time, we point out that if the Jewish community wants to survive, then (1) we need to help singles find Jewish mates (thank God for J-Date!); (2) we need to welcome Jews by choice in a much more focused and energetic way; (3) we need to welcome interfaith couples to our community so that they might consider raising their children as Jews (and possibly even that the non-Jewish spouse convert to Judaism); and (4) we need to make Jewish education affordable for young Jews. The last of the items on that list means that Jews beyond the childbearing age must contribute substantially to the education of their grandchildren, for which they are halakhically obligated, and to other Jewish children whose parents need financial help to make Jewish education possible. I fully understand that all of these steps are all a tall order, but nothing less than the future of the Jewish people and Judaism depend on them. In our demographic crisis, every Jew counts.
Shabbat shalom.