Ki Sisa

“For you shall count the number of the Children of Israel . . . and there should not be amongst them a plague, as a result of your counting them “ (Shemos 30: 12).

“As a result of His love for them does the Almighty count the Jewish people constantly. When they left Egypt He counted them, when they fell at the sin of the Golden Calf, He counted them to know how many remained, and when He wanted to rest His Shechina, the Divine Presence, upon them, He counted them on the first of Nisan at the inaugural erecting of the Mishkan and He counted them again on the first of Iyar.” (Rashi, Bamidbar 1:1)

This concept of counting by the Almighty as a means of showing His Divine pleasure is most difficult to understand at face value. After all, how can we relate to Hashem the human behavior of counting something we care about?! Hashem knows everything; does He ever need to count anything to know its quantity? And even would He wish to count, why would He need the aid of humans in this census? And even more, how could the result of this expression of Divine pleasure be a plague, for which the end of our verse states, an atonement for their souls is required to be saved from extinction!?!

Although these issue are most complex, to explain in brief:

We must understand that the creation of the universe as we perceive it is nothing more than an obscuring of the true existence of the Almighty, blessed be He. As the Torah tells us, “There is nothing other than He”. Rather, Hashem limited His own expression of existence by “clothing” it within a physical Creation which in turn, obscures His true existence.

All creations, therefore, to the extent of their spirituality, can perceive the true relationship between all created beings and their Creator, that in fact, any expression of the created object’s existence is but an obscuring of His true reality. Man, as the pinnacle of creation, was given the ability through his behavior here in the physical world to influence the perception of the Divine Presence as made available to us by the Almighty. Thus, he has the power to effect an “awareness” between the Divine and man, to “strip away” to some extent the veneer of “reality” that dogs all created things and allow them to better come into connection with the root of their created-ness— Hashem. In the language of our sages, the apparent veneer is called “obscurity” and the connectedness is called “rememberance” (Obviously, this is a borrowed term, since the Almighty does not “forget” anything.—ed.).

The holy Torah, more lofty even than the root of all creation, teaches us through which behaviors we can lessen this degree of “obscurity” and increase the “rememberance”. One of the behaviors which increases the latter is counting each and every Jew. Hence, an expression of the Almighty’s love for us is His command to count Jews—an act which brings about an awareness between the Children of Israel and their Divine source.

However, this closeness, as it is a state of increased clarity of the true reality of the universe, possesses a downside as well. When placed in an environment of clarity, one must be careful that he is pure, lest his faults be too apparent. Thus, the Torah also commands the Jewish nation concerning the donation of atonement” charity, in order that in their increased awareness of the Divine they be perceived as fundamentally pure beings.

Some of the depth of the truth—“ain od milvado”, “there is nothing but Him”.

(This d'var Torah is based on the work Peninei Daas, the essays of the Telsher Rosh HaYeshiva Rabbi Eliyahu Meir Bloch, zt"l, edited by Rabbi Noson Tzvi Baron, shlit"a, and Rabbi Avrahom Chaim Levin, shlit"a, vol. 1, p. 222)