Parashat Bamidbar -- Tikkun

“Teach us to number our days,” declares the Psalmist, “that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12) .

For the past 45 days, we have counted.

Seven times seven, from Pesach to Shavuot…so close to the end now, 49 in sight.  Our days of counting almost complete.

This week, we begin a new book of Torah.  This Shabbat we are told to expand our enumerations: “Count people,” Torah tells us.

In Hebrew, this new book of Torah is called “Bamidbar,” in the wilderness.  In its columns, the Israelites are neither enslaved nor free.  They are the great wanderers trapped in a spiraling 40 year journey.  They are neither here nor there.  This is the desert.

In English, this new book is called Numbers, called by the Rabbis “The Book of the Census,” for it is bookended by two census takings.
---

Rabbi Yaakov Culi teaches that something which is counted cannot lose identity or impact. From this interpretation, a great network of meaning is spun.

For the rabbis, the countings in Bamidbar were not just tactical exercises, but spiritual expressions.  The rabbis understood these to be the moments in which each individual Israelite became a part of history.  Each one remembered.  Black fire on white.

And yet, when I read this week’s parasha, I can’t feel poetry.  All I see is injustice.  When days are numbered, none is skipped.  But in Torah, when our people are supposedly numbered, only some are counted, others pushed aside.  These great moments of Numbers, recalled as empowering, are actually alienating and exclusive.

In the opening verses of Numbers, God commands Moses, “Take a census of the entire community of Israel.”  But, God continues, “Listing the names, every male, head by head” (Numbers 1:2). According to this, the entire community of Israel only includes Israelite men (and later priests).  What to make of this oversight?  The qualifiers continue: Only the first born priests, only Israelites of fighting age.  For generations, men and women, children and the elderly, teens and toddlers, labored through enslavement together.  Now, in the desert, they were sectioned off.  You are favored.  You are cast aside.

In Hebrew, the words for “take a census” are “s’u et rosh,” or, literally “lift the head.”  I imagine a cosmic game of duck, duck, goose taking place in the wilderness.  The people sat clustered, waiting with bated breath, tingling with anticipation, yearning for that divine tap, and with it the knowledge that they too were a part of the eidah, of God’s Israelite community.  And the disappointment they must have felt, when only some were tapped, others passed.  Their heads left fallen.

This is not the only time in which Torah says “the people,” but does not include all.  In fact, next week, as we welcome in Shavuot, the holiday on which we receive Torah at Sinai, we will read the famous revelatory passages of Exodus 19.  In these verses Moses commands “the people” in the preparations for Sinai, “do not go near a woman” (Exodus 19:14).  Clearly “this people” excludes the mothers and grandmothers, daughters and sisters, nursemaids and widows.  Duck, duck, goose…

In the 16th century, the rabbis of Safed created a tradition of Leil Tikkun Shavuot, meaning “repairing the night of Shavuot.”  This custom, of staying up all night to study, stemmed originally from the rabbis disappointment in their Israelite ancestors, who chose to sleep away the night before receiving Torah.  The mystics decided: we will now stay up all night studying Torah every Erev Shavuot in preparation for revelation.  A classic act of tikkun, repair.  Take something that you wish was done differently in the past and reenact differently—better in the present.

I am inspired by this Shavuot tradition.  If the kabbalists can rework aspects surrounding revelation and desert life, why can’t we?   Biblically only some were counted, others left marginalized.  And so, let us include.  Let us make whole.  Let us repair.

The rabbis clearly saw the dual nature of counting—both external (How many are we?) and internal (Who are we?).

On an external level, we at TIOH see counting as a value.  We are a diverse and inclusive community and pride ourselves on being such.  Our membership rolls are, in and of themselves, a tikkun to our ancestors’ missed opportunities to number fully their community.  We reject an exclusionary Torah or Judaism.  We seek to welcome everyone who walks in our doors.  In this community, every child, every man, every woman, every newborn, every senior citizen is not only counted, but also celebrated.  We are Jews by birth and Jews by choice, Jews of color, Jews of European descent and Jewish of Sephardic descent.  Intermarried, single, gay, straight.  And our efforts are ongoing.  This past Tuesday night, our Temple took another step toward full repair.  Our board unanimously passed a resolution in support of marriage equality.  Let every family be counted in this community, they said.

On an internal level, as well, we are left now to do our own spiritual work.  This tikkun is each of ours alone.  This is the time for both counting and receiving Torah.  This is the time to take stock of our own internal lives.  Let us claim our own Tikkun.  Our ancestors ignored, pushed aside, and made invisible members of their own community.  We too ignore, push aside, and make invisible aspects of our own selves.

Which aspects of ourselves have we pushed to the side?
What internal work have we chosen to ignore?
What difficult conversations have we left unspoken?
What needs have we made invisible?
Which feelings have we left unexpressed?

This is a time for counting that which has been left uncounted.  A time for numbering and naming.  On this Shabbat let us be reminded: Our work toward a desert tikkun always holds the reward of a Promised Land.

“Teach us to number our days,” declares the Psalmist, “that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).

Teach us to number ourselves, we learn, that we may live lives of fullness.