There are some things we do as part of our Jewish practice that we assume are somehow, somewhere codified as halacha: Jewish law. Covering mirrors in a house of mourning is one such ritual. So is using the back of a shovel when burying someone at a Jewish burial. For Ashkenazi families, it’s transgressive to name a newborn after someone who’s alive.
None of the practices mentioned above are halacha. They are deeply rooted superstitions. Many have to do with a fear of death. In fact, one of the most common Jewish expressions is a prime example of such a superstition: kine hora! This phrase is an exhortation which means: don’t tempt the evil eye. It’s that convoluted magical thinking that warns us against saying the ‘wrong thing’: talking about one’s children, moving to a new home, detailing a new travel plan, even exclaiming “I feel great” or “It’s a beautiful day!” can bring disaster.
I’m not sure from whence this comes. Maybe it’s recognition of the tenuousness of life, how nothing is assured. Perhaps it also comes from living in the Diaspora, where our ancestors had so little control over their fate, and where a sense of vulnerability was acutely felt every day. Add to that an overall fear of death, and one achieves the perfect recipe for desperately hoping we might control the trajectory of our lives.
There is another Jewish superstition: never count people directly. If you need to know whether a minyan has gathered, you don’t point and say one, two, three. Instead, you recite the first ten words of the first morning blessing: Mah-tovu ohalecha Ya’akov mishkenotecha Yisrael V’ani b’rov chasdecha Avo b’techa— and let the words do the counting. Each person gets a word, and when the verse runs out, you have your answer. Another approach for minyan gathering is to go around, saying, “Not one. Not two…” All the way to “not ten”.
We are, right now, in the book of Bamidbar — Numbers —when God tells Moses: Se’u et rosh kol adat Bnei Yisrael — “Lift up the head of the whole Israelite community.” Count them. And they do, elaborately, tribe by tribe, each man above twenty tallied with almost bureaucratic precision. The total: 603,550. The Israelites, freshly liberated, newly covenanted, on the verge of their long march toward home — counted, recorded, known.
But this census is not a headcount. Each person contributes a half-shekel, and the coins are tallied. The people themselves are never directly numbered. God commands the census, but even God’s census uses an intermediary object. The half-shekel stands in for the person. The coin is countable. The person, apparently, is not. This makes sense from a bureaucratic perspective: just count the coins rather than have people stand in long lines.
But there’s more here than bureaucracy or a kine hora. Not counting affirms the value of the individual. Judaism spends so much time in the world of the first-person plural. It’s all about us, the people of Israel. But to ignore the needs and thoughts of every individual, subsuming them in a corporate whole, steals from them – from us! A true sense of self, without which we become automatons, the masses.
In the Talmud it says, that each person contains an entire world. If that is true, then a human being is not, in any meaningful sense, a number. A number is finite. It can be added, subtracted, compared. But a person who contains a world? You can’t really count that. You can only approximate it, and every approximation is a kind of loss.
Philosophically, the half-shekel works as a ritual solution. It doesn’t pretend to capture the person. It stands in for them, modestly, as a placeholder. The coin says: I acknowledge your presence without claiming to measure your worth.
We live in an age that is extraordinarily good at counting people. Algorithms track us, data brokers sell us, institutions reduce us to demographics, metrics, risk scores, engagement rates. There is a census happening around us all the time.
This is our supreme balancing act: recognizing the needs of the community and considering the needs of the individual. This is why it’s hard to be a Jew. This is why it’s hard to live in a democracy. We are human and thus, vulnerable to pain and illness and confusion and anxiety. And every human deserves respect and concern. Kine hora.
Before Shabbat 