Parshas Bamidbar
The opening verses of Bamidbar tell us about the census that was taken for the purpose of dividing the land of Israel among the twelve tribes. This census took place in the wilderness of Sinai, in the Tent of Meeting known as the Ohel Mo’ed, on the first day of the second month. (1:1).
Why did G-d wait till the second month before taking the census? Wasn’t this matter important enough to make it happen in the first month of Nissan? The answer is that we are talking here about inheritance and division of the land. Who is going to be entitled to receive more valuable real estate, say in Jerusalem, where land is worth more, and who in the Negev, where land is worth less.
The Torah is realistic. It knows that there is no subject that creates more strife than the subject of inheritance or the division of property. Nissan, is the month of joy, which is why we do not recite Tachanun the whole month (Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 429:2). Nissan is mostly taken up with the festival of Pesach, its preparation, celebration and aftermath, when the people are united in their gratitude to G-d for redeeming them from slavery. This was not the right time to throw them into squabbles and dissent, often unfortunate by-products of the distribution of wealth and inheritance. The month of Iyar was a better time for that.
Why was it necessary to give us the exact location where the census took place, both in the wilderness of Sinai and the Ohel Moed?
The book of Bamidbar includes many stories of the people of Israel’s ingratitude and skepticism. Very often they chose to see the glass half empty rather than half full. And so, rather than appreciate the miracle of the manna falling from heaven and sustaining them for forty years in the wilderness, they called it “disgusting food” (21:5). Rather than celebrate the abundant fruits of the land of Israel which raised such vigorous inhabitants, and which promised to do the same for them, they looked upon the land as one that consumes its inhabitants and upon the giants it produced as making them feel like grasshoppers (13:28)
It is this choice that everyone has between faith and cynicism, between optimism and pessimism that the opening words “in the wilderness of Sinai in the Tent of Meeting” address.
After all, there were two ways of viewing the Ohel Moed. One was to see it as a sign of how much G-d loves us. Even for the one month it would take to arrive in the Land of Israel, He builds us a tent, a Mishkan, because like newlyweds, he cannot wait for permanent housing, for the Beit Hamikdash to be built. He wants to move in with us right away. Or they could say, Aha, G-d knew that we would be wandering in the desert for forty years and would not be going directly to the land of Israel in a month from now. That is why he had us erect a temporary sanctuary that would serve our needs in the desert.
The words the Torah uses for describing the census is “Se’u es rosh” (1:2), which literally means “lift up the heads” of the entire community. Why lifting up heads? What does that have to do with taking a census? The way society sees it, people only count when they have money. Those without, don’t count at all. Except at election time, when the politicians need every vote. Suddenly, the poor are as important as the rich. All you need to be included in the count is to have a head, to be alive. The census, like an election, is the great equalizer. Here the poor can hold their heads high and know that they count too.
The Torah tells us how many people were in each tribe for the purpose of allocating the land. The more people a particular tribe had, the more land it needed. After giving us the count of each tribe, the Torah adds the numbers up for us and tells us that the entire tally was 603,550 (1:46). Are we not able to add up ourselves? The message is that ultimately, discrepancies in wealth and fortune do not matter if the nation is at one.
Like in an election, the division of the land among the twelve tribes had to be supervised by officials who made sure that there would be no fraud involved in allocating the land. “And with you there shall be one man of each tribe, a man who is a leader” (1:4). The word the Torah uses to describe these leaders is “hu,” these people are already leaders; not “yiheyu,” that they will be appointed as leaders. The leaders of the tribe were not appointed for the job. Rather, they were natural leaders who had already earned the respect of the members of their tribe, who looked up to them as role models. Indeed, this democratic tradition of great leaders, gedolim, emerging from the ranks of common consensus rather than being appointed has its roots here.
“Moshe and Aharon took aside these leaders whose names had been designated” for the job of supervising the division of the land (1:17). The word the Torah uses for “designated” is “nikvu” a word that is derived from the root “kabah,” which means to curse (Vayikra 24:11 and Bamidbar 22:18). People in leadership positions are often the target of curses directed at them by individuals who think they have been wronged, even when the leaders acted in utmost good faith. We see this with the son of the woman from the tribe of Dan who wanted to pitch his tent in the camp of Dan, but was told by the Beit Din of Moshe that he was not eligible to do so because his father was not of the tribe of Dan (Rashi to Vayikra 24:10). What was this man’s reaction? Did he accept the honest, good faith judgment of Moshe? No, he cursed the Giver of the judgment. Many of our Shoftim, like Shmuel, died young on account of such malevolent curses.