Who was there?

Who was There? by Suzanne Brody

Every week, when I come home from teaching, my husband invariably asks me two questions: how did it go? And how many kids were there today? This concern about how many people were present is often used as a gauge for how successful an event was. One gets the impression that the program somehow failed if there weren’t enough people there, regardless of the quality experienced by those actually present.

G-d, too, sometimes seems overly preoccupied with numbers of people. How many adult males are present? How many first born baby boys? How many priests?

Yet, when I enter a room full of people, the first thing I do is look around to see who’s there, not count how many people there are. Only after I’ve assessed who is there do I occasionally stop to estimate the number of people.

The censuses conducted on behalf of G-d undergirds the well-known Jewish belief that each person is a precious individual made in the image of G-d. It is the people behind the numbers recorded in the Torah who reflect back to us our own uniqueness as individuals. And we read that each and every person counted in the census of the Israelites was given a designated location to camp in relation to the Tabernacle. So we learn that one way for each of us to affect and be affected by the world is by being aware of our surroundings. When we recognize that each and every one of us and what we do in the world counts, we become aware that how we treat our location matters.

One way that we impact the world around us, both near and far, is by choosing what we eat based on where we are. In each of our “assigned” locations around the Tabernacle (or, in our modern world, around the globe), we find our own unique individualized buffet. One person choosing to eat locally grown produce might not seem like much. But when we take a census and account for all of us together choosing to eat based on our own locations, not all clustered together, but distributed all around our holy planet, we find that we truly can make a difference both in our own lives and in the lives of others around us.

Suzanne Brody is a rabbinical student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies. A graduate of Wellesley College, Dr. Brody received her PhD in neuroscience from UCSD. Her book of poetry, Dancing in the White Spaces, celebrates Shabbat and Torah, and her current work examines infertility in the Tanach and some of the many intersections between science and Judaism.