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October 2010/Cheshvan 5771
A JOURNAL OF JEWISH RESPONSIBILITY
Counting Jews
Richard Hirsh
Knowing What Counts . . 1
Uzi Rebhun,
Gilad Malach,
& Ruth Gavison
Demographic Trends
in Israel. . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Tobin Belzer, Keren
McGinity, Benjamin
Phillips, Diane Tobin,
Jack Ukeles & Shawn
Landres
Counting What Matters:
A Roundtable . . . . . . . . 4
Steven M. Cohen
Bad Things Happen
to Good Numbers . . . . . 8
Ruhama Weiss
Who Is Rich and What
Is a Big Community? . . . 9
Noam Pianko
Why Counting Can Be
Counterproductive . . . . 10
Discussion Guide . . . . . 11
“Teach Us to Count
Our Days”
Dayle A. Friedman
Make Our Days Count . 11
Rachel Brodie
The Trap of Numbers. . 12
Shira Shazeer
Counting Our
Children’s Days . . . . . 12
Ted Sasson
A Parting of Ways?. . . . 13
Leonard Saxe
Counting American
Jewry ............. 14
Jeffrey S. Gurock
New York: A City’s
Many Jewish Stories . . 15
Toba Spitzer, Sami
Barth, Ira Sheskin,
Aaron Brusso
NiSh’ma . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Bonnie Koppell
Sh’maEthics . . . . . . . 20
Numbers count. And while our people have always been relatively few, how many is too few Jews? Since the days of King David, our numbers have been a source of contention. Today is no different. When does a preoccupation with the number of
Arabs, or ultra-Orthodox or Russian Jews in Israel, cross the line separating legitimate
political consideration from rank racism or ethnocentrism? Should we count intermarried
couples as Jewish? Jewish Buddhists? Will the controversy over how Jews are counted and
who counts as a Jew ever abate?
This month, Sh’ma explores these questions in the context of demography and more:
We ask about how, and whether, numbers ought to determine policy: Who are we as we count
ourselves? How do we count on the world’s stage as Jews? In addition, three contributors —
representing three different points along the spectrum of years — reflect on Psalm 90, “Teach
us to count our days,” and two writers wonder about the legitimacy, or wisdom, of counting.
Some numbers have enormous poignancy, power, and cache: ten for a minyan, seven
days of the week, Six Million. That power is harnessed by gematria, a system that suggests
the mystical relationship of the Hebrew alphabet to numerical equivalencies. Throughout
this issue, as we contemplate numbers, we share some numbers of our own, puncturing
the wall between publishing and print, and, we hope, enlightening readers about the journal
in the process. —S.B.
Knowing What Counts
RICHARD HIRSH
Iwas at a Hillel Shabbaton during college when I first discovered the Jewish aversion to counting. I was admonished by an observant student to stop counting “one, two,
three….” to see if we had a minyan. Bumped
from my nascent venture into gabbai-hood, I
watched my classmate start over with “not one,
not two, not three…” Whence this anxiety?
While the Torah includes
two instances where counting people is mandated
(Exodus 30: 12 and Numbers
1:1), the narrative drama occurs later, when
King David is both commanded to take a census and then punished for that very act. (II
Samuel 24:1) And when this story is retold in
the first book of Chronicles (21:1), God is excised as the source of the command to take a
census and Satan is substituted: “Satan arose
against Israel and incited David to number
Israel.” Hence, “not one, not two, not three…”
allows us to count without really counting.
For a people obsessed with the imagined
threat of becoming statistically insignificant,
we are curiously ambivalent about numbering
ourselves. Some segments of the Jewish com-
munity (federations, agencies, academia) are
devoted to demographics and regularly produce
“community studies” that presume to count
Jews from all sorts of angles (i.e., age, religious
observance, geography, marital status). Other
segments of the Jewish community (the obser-
vant, primarily) refrain from counting Jews, not
Counting is but one refraction of the broader category
of measuring, assessing, identifying, and defining.
only in the case of determining the requisite
number for a minyan, but also in simple social
circumstances. There remains an unvoiced and
perhaps unconscious nod toward the ayin hara,
the evil eye — “How many children did you say
you have? We’ll see about that….”
A commandment “to count,” though, is
found in the Torah: to count time. “You shall
count… the omer [sheaf]…50 days from [what
the talmudic rabbis later clarify as] the second
day of Pesach (mimacharat haShabbat) until
Shavuot.” (Leviticus 23: 15-16) We know this
as the mitzvah of Sefirat HaOmer, the counting
