Not Just a Number

שְׂאוּ אֶת רֹאשׁ כָּל עֲדַת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל (במדבר א, ב)

“Take the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel” (Bamidbar 1:2)

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Rabbi Yeshaya Halevi Horowitz, known as “the Shela”h” - an acronym for the title of his work Shnei Luchos Habris, explains the significance of the Jewish nation being counted.

In Jewish law, a davar sheb’minyan, something that is counted, sold by unit rather than by weight, is never nullified even in a mixture of a thousand or a million others. Under certain circumstances, certain food items are “nullified” when mixed with a quantity many times their volume, i.e.  if some milk drops fall into a meat soup, and the volume of the meat mixture is sixty times that of the milk, then the milk is considered nullified and nonexistent. Objects that are prominent, however, can never be ignored; they are never considered insignificant. Being a “counted object”, meaning something which is sold solely by unit, is one means for an object to be ascribed this Halachic “prominence”.

By counting the Jewish people in the desert, writes the holy Shela”h, every individual Jew earned the davar sheb’minyan prominence, and his Jewish identity can never be swallowed or lost.

There are several other types of prominent objects which are never nullified, such as “a complete organism” or “a living being”. Why was the Jewish prominence achieved specifically through counting? For while those distinctive traits are obvious and self-evident, the distinction of the counted object is not; it is the counting itself which indicates to us that this is an object of significance and individual value.

Counting the Jewish people thus affected and revealed the significance and indomitable Jewishness of the individual Jew, even he in whom no trait of Jewish distinction and value is currently evident.

Likutei Sichos vol. 18, p. 25

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