This was my D’var Torah about Parashat B’midbar, the opening of the book of Numbers, on May 20, 2023.
This D’var Torah about the beginning of the book of Numbers is brought to you by the Koch Brothers, Paul Simon, baseball cards, the psychology departments at Ohio State and the University of Oregon, the 2023 graduating class of Rivier University, and the tribe of Levi.
My favorite album of Paul Simon’s is his 1983 disc called “Hearts and Bones” and one of the songs on it is called “When Numbers Get Serious.” The first line of the song is basically the tag line for this D’var Torah: I have a number in my head, though I don’t know why it’s there.
We’ll loop back to that. Now, the Koch brothers. Because I went to Israel in the middle of the spring semester of my junior year in high school, a few years later I earned something like $31 and change one day from the infamous Koch brothers. Because of the Israel trip I took typing, and because I could type I registered for work at a bunch of temp agencies when I was home from college one summer, and from the temp agencies I got exactly one job for one day. The Koch Refinery is beyond the city outskirts; it’s got those enormous white blobs and towers like near to Logan or Newark Airport. I was told to go to a kind of office shack in the middle and was brought to an interior room with a computer terminal, and a big stack of that computer paper with the holes on the side and the alternating green and not-green bars, on which were printed a series of one and two digit numbers, as I recall. My job was to enter as many of the numbers as I could from the printout into the terminal, eight numbers to a line separated by commas followed by a return. Which I did. For eight hours.
I have no idea what I was doing. I don’t know if I was helping to calibrate the smokestacks to bring air pollution back in line, or if I was building some kind of chemical weapon. I don’t know if there was a regular person who did this job every day and was out sick, or if just every so often someone had to enter numbers. I did not ask, and somehow I accomplished the task. I am the sort of person who spaces out in the second or third movement of a symphony for a bit, so doing the work for that long was an achievement. Though as I say I have no idea what the achievement was. Perhaps I was starring in a one-man absurdist drama.
This would be an extreme example of I have a number in my head, though I don’t know why it’s there. Rows and columns of numbers, far away from people, abstracted from any source or destination. I was that day the human equivalent of a server farm for Google or Amazon, transporting digits around with no connection to them at all.
Some people are suspicious of numbers and things that are conveyed in numbers for that reason. My day at the Koch refinery is extreme, but others would say that our lives are being controlled in all sorts of ways by a sort of number-gelatin process, which extracts something about each one of us, throws it into a vat, stirs it and distills out some numbers that are then used by a network of number-networked machines to show us things to read or buy or respond to with some public action.
Or as Paul Simon put it:
Take my address/Take my phone/Call me if you can
Here’s my address/Here’s my phone/Now, please don’t give it to some madman…
However.
Here is a little spreadsheet I have, which also has numbers in rows of about eight, and I want to read you one column:
31, 23, 37, 36, blank, blank, blank, 36, 32, 25, 43, 28, 30, 1, 13, 29 — and it goes on sort of like that.
That’s not a souvenir I took from the Koch refinery. I will read it again, as it ought to be:
31!, 23, 37!, 36! — blank, blank, blank — 36!, 32!, 25, 43!, 28, 30! – 1 – 13, 29!, 28, 24, 38!!, 26.. 10… 29.
This is a story. It is the season by season home run totals of Ted Williams, the greatest player in the history of the Boston Red Sox. The writer Bill James wrote: “Do not the numbers of Ted Williams detail a story of fierce talent, and by the char of their ugly gaps, the ravages of exquisite frustration that ever accompany imperfect times?” In just these 19 numbers, with a gap of three, you can see a man burst into excellence, be taken off to World War II, return just as talented as he had been before, and then begin one year off and one year back on, then off to Korea, and back almost but not quite as good, and just as he seemed to be finished, one final hurrah. It’s not only a picture worth a thousands words, but 19 numbers worth lines and lines of story.
Sometimes numbers are like that. Much more important than baseball: Daily labs for a patient long in the hospital. Monthly numbers of children whose families qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Program. Numbers can serve a story; they can help us understand one faster and more truthfully. It’s possible to be numerate and compassionate with the same eyes.
It is not the natural thing, however. Researchers at Oregon and Ohio State ran an ingenious yet troubling study in 2013 about charitable giving. Subjects were shown a photo of one child in Save the Children-type campaign, and other subjects were shown a photo of two children — and already at two, the average gift in response dropped. It went up again for those who saw two children one at a time. I don’t know if this is because we are wired not for numbers but for one-to-one love, or if this is our cultural and historical moment, where we are both overwhelmed with information and suspicious of those who so often have misled us with numbers.
To me the answer is not to turn our back on numbers, but to train ourselves spiritually, to notice numbers and respond to them by reconnecting them to people.
Last Sunday, I had the honor of joining the 794 graduates of Rivier University who were receiving associates and bachelors and masters and doctorates and certificates. I received my honorary degree, which meant two things — my part of the program was done very early, and I was seated on the stage in the front row. Now at graduation, you’re usually there for someone you know, and you try to figure out how long until that name will be read. As the names were read, I started to do the math — one name read out every 6-7 seconds, can someone figure out how many hours? And again, I’m the guy who zones out part way through the symphony.
But from my yetzer ha-ra — my “evil inclination” thinking about what people would say about me in the front row, visible to all — and my yetzer tov, my generous impulse, I decided this was a challenge I was supposed to receive: to be present for all 794, to look at each of them as they walked with expectation and smiled with diploma in hand, and to whisper congratulations toward each one of them. For over an hour I tried to connect to these people I do not know save for one, Samba Halkose of the Nashua Adult Learning Center. If we cross paths again I may not even realize it. But each of their educations is precious, and the sum of 794 more credentialed people serving our community and our world is also precious. It felt good to try to do this, a kind of spiritual exercise of being numerate and grateful in the same gaze.
In our Torah reading there are a lot of numbers. We often say there were 600,000 individual Israelite men of fighting age — the parasha says 603,550. There were 22,273 first-born males aged one month and older, and the tribe of Levi was supposed to represent them, to serve the Divine in their place because these first-born were the ones whose lives were saved on the last night in Egypt. But my favorite number is the parasha is this — there were 273 fewer Levites than necessary to cover all the first-born. Only 22,000 males of the tribe of Levi.
The numbers were close enough for the broad theme, that the Levites would serve as though they were connected and part of every family in the nation. But still, 273 off. So those 273 were to contribute 5 shekel each to the treasury of the community, to support the work of the sanctuary in the center.
It is important to know when numbers are suggestive but not exact. It is important to make sure every individual is accounted for, even when we have a good sense of the big picture — and to find a creative solution to make sure no one is left out.
The world population is one more because of Eliana, whose birth we are celebrating this Shabbat, and Am Yisrael is one stronger. Other people might not know it, but we do, and we will never be the same for knowing it. We will walk out of here knowing we are greater, knowing the mitzvot that already are flowing out because of Eliana and her parents Jonah and Emma. She will show up in the numbers of the Commonwealth, and that will matter too.
What numbers are in your head, and do you know why they are there? Which numbers have you been avoiding that need to be there?
In the Torah, it’s not numbers vs. the individual. It’s how to use both, and how to cultivate an awareness of both, and to build the side of you that doesn’t come naturally — if you are a numbers person primarily, or if you are not a numbers person at all.
As Paul Simon’s song puts it:
When times are mysterious, serious numbers will always be heard.
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