The numbers of the Israelite people were carefully tallied. Rashi
wants to know why. He says that G-d needed to know. In a modern
context we would say that such information is important for the
government, to assist them to calculate how many soldiers they can
G-d says, “But in My eyes you are a jewel. To Me you matter.
raise in time of war, and to allow them to work out what health,
education and other facilities the population might require.
.
Because of G-d’s love for the Israelites, Rashi explains, He counts
them on a regular basis. Every individual is precious. Every
individual counts. Nobody is a nobody. If a person feels depressed,
alienated and insignificant, G-d says, “But in My eyes you are a
jewel. To Me you matter. My world cannot continue without you.”
Somebody once said, “Idiots must be important to G-d – otherwise why
did He create so many of them?” The Torah point of view is that no-one
is without virtues and value. No-one is written off as far as G-d is
concerned. The Mishnah makes it quite clear: “Man is duty-bound to
say, ‘For my sake was the world created” (Sanh. 37a). G-d decided that
there was a task which only I, or only you, or only anyone, can carry
out. He needs us in His world to carry out that task. When we feel
down in the dumps, we have to remember that.
It would do us all good to read Chapter 3 of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, “Who is Man?”
(1965). Note that Heschel does not ask, “What is man?” That would
imply that man is a thing, a pawn, a conglomerate. His question is
“Who is Man?” Man is unique, precious, sacred. G-d numbers His
creatures and savours every one.
SHORT OF LEVITES
The statistics don’t seem logical: “All the male Levites... were
22,000” (Num. 3:39). In a people numbering 600,000 – and that may be
without women and children, who would have brought the total up to two
million or more – how could there be so few Levites? We can ignore for
the moment the fact that elsewhere in the chapter the Levites add up
to a further three hundred; in our verse the Torah may simply be
giving us a round figure.
Nachmanides links this verse with the opening chapter of Sh’mot which
says that the more the Egyptians oppressed the Israelites, the more
the Israelites increased. The Levites, however, were not enslaved, and
their numbers increased much more slowly.
This is of course a chapter in the long history of Jewish demography
which inevitably has to take account of the influence of outside
factors on the growth and decline of Jewish population figures. Looked
at from the point of view of today’s Jewish world the effect of
internal factors must also be considered. There is the major –
external – problem of the losses caused by the Holocaust. There is
the – external – problem of the effect of urban living, which tends to
reduce the number of children born to a family. There are the internal
influences of assimilation and outmarriage, and the positive response
of orthodox Jewish couples who believe so passionately in Judaism that
they are determined to build up the Jewish population.