The Good News

     There is an odd tradition in Jewish life, an old custom, to not count Jews.  The origins of this tradition are somewhat obscure, but it may stem from a passage in Exodus where God asks Moses to count the Israelites by using a half shekel as a representative for each person, as opposed to simply counting the people straight up.  There also may be something superstitious going on here – and even an idea that when you attach a number to someone, you actually devalue them – they become a number, not a person.

     The problem with this tradition of not counting Jews is that we are actually a community that is fairly obsessed with counting itself.  First of all, just think of shul.  We need how many people for a minyan?  10!!  How do we know if we have enough, if we don’t want to count people?  The motzi!  But on a larger scale, we are constantly counting ourselves – there are currently how many Jews in the world?  About 15.5 million.  Something like 7 million of those Jews live in Israel, another 6.5 million or so here in the States, and the rest scattered around the world.

     We come by the urge to count ourselves naturally, and evidently it is something we’ve been doing for a very long time.  This morning’s Torah portion, material we would consider to be close to 3000 years old, begins with a counting of the ancient Israelites.  That is the reason the book of the Torah we began reading this morning is called Numbers.  So I guess the question is this – why are we so invested in counting ourselves?  Why this need to know how many Jews there are, in a minyan, in a community, in Israel or the US or the world?

     And the answer to that is simple.  There just are not many Jews in the world.  There are about 8 billion people in the world, and as we just said, about 15.5 million Jews.  And so we worry today, and we’ve worried historically, that there are not enough of us, that we are fading away as a people.  

     These days that sense of a tiny Jewish population might feel like just another component of our general unease and discomfort.  After all, we’ve been facing an unprecedented – at least in recent times – level of antisemitism around the world.  We’ve seen Israel struggling with its most difficult time since the the Yom Kippur war in ’73.  We been subjected to the seemingly continuous headlines about anti Israel protests on college campuses.  The old saying is it is hard to be a Jew, and recent events have reminded us of that again and again.  Shver Tsu Zayin a Yid.   

     But you know what?  It is a beautiful spring day today, probably one of the nicest days of the entire year.  It is Shabbat, a day of rest, a day of peace, a day when the tradition asks us to unburden ourselves, to feel the joy of life and a sense of gratitude for our blessings.  So this morning I’d like to bring you some good news from the Jewish world, news that feels promising, hopeful, like there are better days ahead and we just have to get through the difficult time to find them.

     First and most importantly, if you saw the news before you came to shul you know that 4 of the hostages that had been held captive in Gaza were rescued early this morning by the IDF.  So as we continue to pray for the safety and return of the remaining hostages, we can be grateful today that four Israeli families will be welcoming home their loved ones after an unimaginable and horrific 246 day ordeal.  And we can continue to hope that the remaining hostages will one day soon be returned to their families, and even beyond that that ongoing negotiations in the region will enable both Israelis and Palestinians to live in safety and peace.  But lets be grateful today for the freedom of those four hostages, for their families, and for the courage of the IDF soldiers who led them to freedom.

     Along the lines of international news, I am guessing you all know that Mexico has a new president.  Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo is Mexico’s first woman president, but also its first Jewish president!  Mexico is percentage wise a Catholic country – close to 80 percent! –  and only  – back to numbers  – about 50,000 Jews live there, mostly in Mexico City.  So it is a striking thing that a Jew will be president of the country.  Claudia Sheinbaum is not religiously observant, but she does identity as a Jew, is the daughter of Eastern European immigrants, and has publicly spoken in the past about how Jewish values have informed her identity and approach to politics.

     So in a world that has felt recently like it was closing its doors to Jews, shutting Jews out, and hostile to Jews who publicly proclaimed their Jewish identity, it is a welcome sign to see one of the world’s major countries – about 131 million people live in Mexico – elect a Jew to be its president.  Good news!

     One last piece of good news this morning.  We went from Israel, to Mexico, and let’s return here to Beth El.  Just a couple of weeks ago Cantor King and Ben K and I sat down with a young woman and her husband.  The three of us were forming a beit din – a Jewish court – and the young woman came before us because she was at the end of the conversion process and was explaining to us why she wanted to be a Jew.  She talked about her admiration for the Jewish people, she talked about the strength of a Jewish family, she talked about Jewish values like intellectual freedom, honesty, determination, resilience.  She told us she was proud to have the opportunity to become part of the Jewish community and the chance to live her life as a Jew.

     One significant caveat to her story – she also was pregnant – so when the young woman went to the mikveh after our conversation with her, she became Jewish, and her baby did as well.  We were waiting in the outer room, she came out after submersing in the mikveh, and there were tears of gratitude and emotion in her eyes, that is how proud she was, how grateful she was, to become part of the Jewish people.  And if you don’t feel hopeful about the Jewish future when you see that, I don’t know what to tell you. 

     There is even a sense of hope and optimism in this morning’s haftara text.  As I’ve often said, there is always some kind of link between the Torah portion and the haftara.  The link this morning is that the Torah portion begins with a census, a counting of the people.  And the prophet Hosea in the haftara picks up on that idea of counting the people – not in terms of actual numbers today, but in terms of what the numbers might be one day – and Hosea says this:

“והיה מספר בני ישראל כחול הים – the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sands of the sea, which cannot be measured or counted…”

     So let hope come into our hearts today, this beautiful late spring day.  The blue skies, the warm sun, the gentle wind blowing through the trees.  Hope that the Jewish people will be strong and many.  Hope that the Jewish future will be bright.  And hope, today and every day, that one day ביום ההוא – there will be a world of peace.