In shul last weekend we read the first parshah in the Book of Numbers, badmidbar<\/i>, and its haftarah portion from Hosea. And there were some things that connected with me, struck me as very timely, and that I wanted to write a nice essay about. An essay that would connect a bunch of things in the Scripture and in the world today, and come up with a conclusion, or a lesson that I\u2019d learned, or some notion of consolation or redemption.\r\n
Well, and this is the essay that connects the things. I don\u2019t actually have any conclusion yet, after several days of musing over those things. I doubt I will have any conclusion by the time I have finished writing about the things. My plan is to post it anyway\u2014hey, it\u2019s a blog, remember those? There\u2019s a place for comments. Maybe one of y\u2019all Gentle Readers will contribute a conclusion. Maybe more than one of y\u2019all, ideally, with different and incompatible ones. We\u2019ll see.\r\n
Before I talk about the Scripture, I\u2019m going to divert myself for a paragraph or so to talk about talking about Scripture. I write in English, and I think in English, and my Hebrew is frankly terrible; if I didn\u2019t have technological aids, I wouldn\u2019t be able to talk about the Hebrew at all. I like<\/I> the Hebrew, though, and it\u2019s generally the Hebrew that sparks any actual ideas that I have, although as I say, the ideas are in English. There\u2019s a tension there, between languages, between words and ideas. Right? And I\u2019m aware that y\u2019all are reading this in English, and that almost nobody who reads anything on this Tohu Bohu thinks in Hebrew. This is isn\u2019t a bad thing, and in fact I think a lot of the insights that have come to me in this blog have sprung from that tension. But they are, in fact, different languages, and different contexts, and different traditions.\r\n
One thing about this is the names of the books\u2014the Hebrew tradition is to call the book after its first significant word, so it\u2019s called bamidbar<\/i>, in the wilderness. In English, we call it Numbers, following the early Greek and Latin translators, who named it after its first significant event, the Divine instruction for Moses to take a census of all the Israelites in the wilderness. Neither name really identifies the contents of the book as a whole, but the book does involve both things, and one is probably as good a name as the other. It\u2019s just confusing that they\u2019re different. Similarly, the verse in Hosea that I\u2019m going to be talking about<\/a> will be Hosea 1:10 in English bibles, but Hosea 2:1 in Hebrew ones. There\u2019s a reasonable case to be made that the English delineation is correct (vaddevah dat means) but the case remains that in Hebrew bibles the first Chapter of Hosea only has nine verses, while in English ones it has eleven. Numbers, numbers, numbers.\r\n So, the Divine tells Hosea that the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered<\/i>. Now, this is a simile, of course, and Hosea is just saying that there will be many of us. But the wild thing about this verse is that a tradition has grown up that it is literally forbidden for Jews to number Jews. In observant congregations, when they are making sure that there is a minyan of ten people, they will not count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten<\/i>. Not in English, not in Hebrew, not even in Yiddish. The people are literally not to be counted<\/i>. But at the same time, it\u2019s important to know how many of them there are. Ten Jews is a minyan, whether they are men of learning and piety or not; nine rabbis is not. So, what\u2019s a Jew to do?\r\n You could give everyone a marble, and everyone could put a marble into a dish, and then you can count the marbles. That is absolutely allowed, and at the end of it, you will know how many people there are. More traditionally, you can recite a verse that consists of ten words (one tradition uses Psalms 28:9<\/a>) and if you can point at a different person at each word, you know there are at least ten people in the room. You could do that with anything there are ten of, actually, or even anything that you just know how many there are: if you list all Twelve Tribes while pointing at different people, there are more than ten people. I\u2019ve heard of a community counting by the Plagues of Egypt. Heck, you could do it with the names of the movies in the three Star Wars trilogies, and then see if there\u2019s anybody left. A more amusing, bust still allowable way is to not-count people in the following manner: not-one, not-two, not-three, not-four, not-five, not-six, not-seven, not-eight, not-nine, not-ten<\/i>. And having not counted them in that fashion, you can conclude that there are ten people, without having counted them.\r\n This brings up an excellent question: what does it mean that we shouldn\u2019t count the people, but we should have ten of them? Why is it better to pray with ten people than with nine, but bad to count people? Why should Israel be an uncountable thing, but we have an entire scriptural book of Numbers that talks about a Divinely mandated enumeration? Are the parshah and the haftarah contradicting each other?\r\n