So Moses and Aaron took those men who were designated by name, and on the first day of the second month they convoked the whole community, who were registered by the clans of their ancestral houses—the names of those aged twenty years and over being listed head by head.
Bamidbar 1:2
How many Jews are needed in the world? Throughout Jewish history this question has rarely been asked — and yet it is of supreme importance. Why? Because it has no answer.
Any human being has real purpose only when he or she is distinct from others. It is only through distinction that our lives have meaning. Human distinction — the basic condition of both action and speech — bestows both equality and significance. We must make ourselves distinct in order to be understood and worthy of being heard. To be meaningful is to be distinct — not merely because of our racial, religious, or physical affiliations, but as individuals.
And yet, for societies to exist, we also need unity and harmony.
This tension is exemplified by the difference between two mitzvot. In this week’s parashah we are commanded to count the Israelites: “Take the sum total of all the congregation of the children of Israel after their families…” (Bamidbar 1:2). Paradoxically, later in the Torah we find a prohibition against counting the Jewish people directly: “When you take the sum of the children of Israel… then shall they give every man a ransom for his soul” (Shemot 30:12). Instead of counting people, we are told to count half-shekels.[1] From this the sages understood that directly counting people is forbidden. When David counted the people, he was severely punished for this. But why?
The question of Jewish identity
In a remarkable little book, Le Judaïsme raconté à mes filleuls, the French author Marek Halter recounts how, in his youth, he visited the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, author of Réflexions sur la question juive (“Anti-Semite and Jew”). In his book, Sartre maintains that Jewish identity is formed by what non-Jews think of the Jews — in other words, by the attitude of the anti-Semite. Thus, according to Sartre, Jews have no self-identity and are therefore inauthentic.
Halter was deeply troubled. “If this is correct,” he said, “it means that I am only a Jew by the grace of anti-Semites!”[2] Knowing that Sartre was a philo-Semite, he asked how the author of L’Être et le néant (“Being and Nothingness”), who maintained that a human being is only free when authentic, could deny that freedom to the Jew.
“How could you think,” Halter asked, “that my identity depends on a brute?”
Sartre replied: “In my book, I discuss only those Jews who allow others to determine who they are.”
“What, then, are authentic Jews?”
“I suppose those are the religious Jews,” said Sartre. “They decide what image people have of them, not the other way round. They enjoy full freedom. The Jewish identity that others would impose upon them has no hold over them. My reflections are those of a goy, an outsider looking in. Someone from within must give us the portrait of the authentic Jew.”
Sartre was right, writes Halter. Only the religious Jew has decided what his or her Jewish identity truly is. That identity is built on the observance of mitzvot, the Torah, and the belief that the Jewish people were chosen to be a light to the nations.
For the others — the majority of Jews today — it is not clear why they wish to maintain their Jewishness despite antisemitism. Attempts to define Jewish authenticity in purely secular terms have repeatedly failed.
Beyond definition
At the same time, to define or reduce Judaism to specific axioms is both dangerous and impossible. For every definition there are contradictions and exceptions. Is Israel a nation, a religion, or an altogether mysterious entity that will remain unexplainable forever?
It is clear that “Israel” does not fit any particular category or historical scheme. It resists all generalizations. Its uniqueness thwarts the human desire for explanation, since explanation always implies classification. Anything that eludes such definition is alarming — and profoundly disturbing.
As the French Protestant theologian Frédéric Gaussen once observed:
In studying the Jewish people, we are face to face with a miracle, and I venture to say: he who is attentive cannot be incredulous. Everything is a miracle in this incomparable people — its history, its origin, its fall, its dispersion, its stubbornness; the contempt of the nations who owe everything to them, who envy the brilliance of their past and the still greater brilliance of their future. Add to this the unprecedented fact that this people alone, among all nations, forms one family — and that this family, though homeless and miserable, has kept itself isolated from the rest of humankind. This fact alone would be an undeniable miracle, even if the prophet Balaam had not already said: ‘From the top of the rocks I see him, from the hills I behold him; lo, the people shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations’ (Bamidbar 23:9).’[3]
The foundations of Jewish life
At the center of this mystery stand a few practices that, without being fully defined, sustain the entire edifice of Judaism: Shabbat, Kashrut, and Taharat ha-Mishpachah, family purity. These are not abstract concepts but “ideas lived.” They are the foundational building blocks upon which the entire structure of Judaism stands.
Yet, as in modern architecture, the building is much more than the sum of its structural components. While Judaism is much more than these three mitzvot, once they are abandoned, the edifice collapses — as Jewish history has shown time and again.
“It is more that Shabbat kept the Jews alive than that the Jews kept Shabbat alive,” said Ahad Ha-Am, the great Jewish essayist (1856–1927).[4]
The covenant of election at Sinai is the hub of a larger system of Divine covenants by which nature, life, and history converge. This is a crucial insight. The argument “I am a good Jew at heart” is of little value if it remains detached from the lived covenant.
While Sartre may be right that many Jews are Jews because of antisemitism, many secular Jews also see themselves — perhaps subconsciously — as part of a religious tradition they admire, though they may not (fully) practice it.
The Jewish thinker Will Herberg argued that even secular Jews realize, at some level, that they are part of the “mystery of Israel,” and they are proud of it.[5] They wish to be included within the spiritual order of the Jewish people.
The mystery of Jewish existence
Jewish perpetual existence does not emerge from any single category, nor from any combination of them, nor even from all of them together. The secret to Jewish existence transcends all categories that social science can conceive. It is, in essence, a contradiction in terms.
Jewish history is Heilsgeschichte — redemptive history — not merely the story of the Jews, but of all humankind, and for the sake of humankind.
Within the body of Israel, all religion becomes history. It is not a system of abstract propositions to be apprehended intellectually, nor merely a mystical wisdom. It is a faith enacted in history. It cannot be experienced, understood, or communicated apart from that history. Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov and Moshe existed; the Exodus and the Revelation at Sinai were events, even if we do not know precisely how they happened.
This history concentrates on one people — the Jews. It constitutes a language, a culture, and a faith that constantly evolve. Ultimately, it is a calling.
Franz Rosenzweig pointed out that the biblical stories are not merely in what the Torah says, but in how it is read — and even more importantly, how it is heard. Meaning emerges from the way the parts are combined, as in a mosaic: the figure appears only through the arrangement of the tiles. So too with the Divine text. The text is the author of the people — not the other way around.[6]
It is a supernatural community, called into being by God to serve His eternal purposes.
Counting what cannot be counted
We can now understand the contradiction between the commandment to count the Israelites and the prohibition to take their numbers. The Jewish people should not be counted because, in quantity, they are small and insignificant. Their strength lies not in numbers but in their spiritual and moral contribution to the world.
The half-shekel offering symbolizes precisely this truth: Jews can only be counted by what they contribute to the world, in terms of great ideas, religious morality, and the sciences. Each individual is but a fragment, yet together they form an indivisible mysterious whole.
As the sociologist Milton Himmelfarb famously remarked, “The number of Jews in the world is smaller than a small statistical error in the Chinese census.”[7]
It is important to count the Jews only to realize their uncountability.
As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it: “Our existence is either superfluous or indispensable to the world; it is either tragic or holy to be a Jew.”[8]
Notes
[1] Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Temidin uMusafin 4:4; see also Hilchot Shekalim 1:3.
[2] Marek Halter, Le Judaïsme raconté à mes filleuls (Éditions Robert Laffont, 1978), 21–24; Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive(Gallimard, 1946).
[3] Frédéric Gaussen, Der Verkündigung des Evangeliums unter den Juden (Zurich, 1861), 376–377.
[4] Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginsberg), “Shabbat ve-Yisrael,” Ha-Shiloah 5 (1899).
[5] Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man (Farrar, Straus & Young, 1951), 88.
[6] Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), part 2.
[7] Milton Himmelfarb, “No Hitler, No Holocaust,” Commentary 69 (1980): 37–38.
[8] Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1955), 391.
Questions to Ponder
- If directly counting Jews is forbidden because it reduces mystery to quantity, why does the Torah repeatedly insist on censuses at critical moments? Is there a danger that refusing to “count” people becomes a way of avoiding responsibility for real human beings?
- Sartre suggests that only religious Jews possess an authentic Jewish identity. Do you find this claim liberating, offensive, or disturbing? If religious practice defines Jewish authenticity, what does that imply about Jews who feel deeply Jewish but reject observance?
What about Rabbi Cardozo’s suggestion that secular attempts to define Jewish identity inevitably fail? Do you agree—or do you think religious definitions fail just as often, though in different ways? Which kind of failure is more damaging to Jewish continuity? - The claim that Judaism collapses when Shabbat, Kashrut, and family purity are abandoned is historically provocative. Do you see this as an honest reading of history—or as a selective narrative that overlooks other sources of Jewish resilience?
Ahad Ha-Am’s assertion that Shabbat kept the Jews alive suggests that practice, not belief, is decisive. Do you feel that Judaism can really survive on practice alone? - If Jewish history is Heilsgeschichte—history for the sake of all humankind—does that impose a moral burden on Jews that borders on arrogance? How do you distinguish between chosenness as responsibility and chosenness as self-congratulation?
