Question 18: How do we count?

This is a lightly edited version of the sermon I gave at West End Synagogue on May 31, 2025 for BaMidbar, the start of the book of numbers. You can listen to it in full here:

Earlier this week, I fixed myself a plate of leftovers for lunch. Adami had cooked couscous, chickpeas, and cauliflower with salad, and I’d made an accidentally giant batch of hummus. I spooned some of each onto a dish, drizzled lemon juice and olive oil, and sprinkled some za’atar purchased in Pardes Hana the last time we went to visit my mother-in-law. I didn’t count out amounts. I ate what I wanted, and later that afternoon I nursed Nathaniel, who got the sustenance he needed from the food that I’d eaten. 

This is how it should be— not having to measure things that are universal needs. Of course I should count on having food to eat. Of course so should my son. Of course I should count on being able to put him down for a nap somewhere safe and clean. Of course I should be able to count on the safety of my husband, Nathaniel’s father, at his office an hour from home. But I worry for Adami’s safety, even as a tall white man, because he wears a Magen David necklace and I have no idea what people will assume about him, or what it’s ok to do to him because of what they assume about him. I worry about him walking across the campus where he works, or sitting across from the wrong person on the wrong train. Could his many identities and his support for peace be discounted as thoroughly as Sarah Milgrim’s last week? Would someone looking for someone to be angry at discount the value of his life? And if that happened, would thousands of people cheer on the violence because they counted a symbol around his neck as one of evil? 

What we count, and what we discount, matters . 

This week in Torah, at the start of the book of numbers, we take an accounting. Moses is instructed by God (Num 1:2):

 שְׂא֗וּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ֙ כׇּל־עֲדַ֣ת בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָ֖ם לְבֵ֣ית אֲבֹתָ֑ם

Take up the head-count of the entire community of the Children of Israel, by their families, by their Fathers’ Houses

It’s our people’s census. A chance for us to record: who is a part of this community? How many of us are there wandering the desert? But of course it’s a bit more complicated, because the Torah goes on: 

בְּמִסְפַּ֣ר שֵׁמ֔וֹת כׇּל־זָכָ֖ר לְגֻלְגְּלֹתָֽם׃ מִבֶּ֨ן עֶשְׂרִ֤ים שָׁנָה֙ וָמַ֔עְלָה כׇּל־יֹצֵ֥א צָבָ֖א בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל

[Count] according to the number of names,  every male by their skull. (2) from the age of twenty years and upward,  everyone going out to the armed-forces in Israel:

Most of us would not count in this census. The only people whose lives were truly counted were Israelite  men, aged 20 and older— and the rabbis say there’s an upper cutoff at 60— able to bear arms. No women or non-binary people. None, according to ibn Ezra, of the mixed multitude accompanying us out of Egypt. No children. No seniors. No one disabled. This counting did what so many counts do: draw clear and sometimes problematic lines around who and what counts and who and what does not. 

For the last 600 days, we have been counting the days of the war in Gaza and its devastating impact. Some of us have been focused primarily on counting the hostages remaining in captivity, counting the number returned alive and dead, counting the IDF casualties, counting the instances of antisemitism on and around college campuses, counting the American politicians saying the “right” and “wrong” things about Judaism and Zionism. Others of us have been focused primarily on counting the number of Palestinians struck dead by bombs or IDF fire, counting the universities and hospitals and homes leveled, counting the number of forced relocations, counting the expelled and abducted college students here, counting the American politicians saying the “right” and “wrong” things about Palestinians and free speech. We all count, but we count different things, and just as our ancestors didn’t count women and children and elders and disabled people and non-Jews in the census, so many of us do not currently count all that merits counting in this time. 

I want to be clear that I believe, without qualification, that Jewish pain counts. I am disgusted and angered by those who use “Zionist” as a stand-in for “Nazi” and by doing so have justified and even celebrated acts like the murders in DC last week. I am disturbed by the number of Americans who have seemingly decided that Israel’s conduct in Gaza is the only international topic of import despite the many governments around the globe engaged in inhumane acts, and by the willingness many otherwise reasonable people seemingly have to say that the lives of Israelis don’t count as worthy because of where they happen to have been born. Yes, Jewish pain counts, and we must advocate for it to count, because it is too easy to watch it slip off to the side. But our pain does not exist in a vacuum, it is not all that counts, and naming Palestinian suffering only as a sidebar to Israeli suffering—when it numerically eclipses it many times over— does not count as truly engaging with the reality of this time and this war.

We cannot control the initial emotional response we experience when we learn of a terrible event in the world: the murder of two young people emerging from a Jewish event in DC, the starvation of young— and old — Palestinians in Gaza, the torture of hostages, the deaths of 30 members of the same Palestinian family. We may find ourselves resonating more with some tragedies than with others, struck by fear more by some circumstances than others, enraged by some injustices more than others. We may respond with particular anguish when we hear particular terms applied to what’s happening in Israel and Palestine, whether those terms are accurate or slanderous or somewhere in between. 

We cannot control our initial emotional response but we can control where we go from there, and if your response to the war is still to count Jewish loss as all that matters, or even mostly what matters, I need you to come on a different journey with me. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that our very souls are counting on us. 

Earlier this week, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote in an Op-Ed in Haaretz: “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. We're not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it's the result of government policy – knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.” He asserts that the bad actors, both in government and in the Settlements— 22 of which were newly sanctioned this week— are a plurality of people who must be counted, not merely a fringe group, writing: “When a Palestinian village burns down, and quite a few already have, they'll tell us that the perpetrators are a small, violent group that does not represent settlers. This is a lie. They are many.”

PM Olmert did not start out thinking this way. Like many Jews, and many devoted Zionists, he has counted these days of war until they simply became too many, until too many Right Wing Messianic Ministers started saying the quiet part out loud. Rabbi Jay Michaelson, a Brooklynite who supported the war for its first months, recently ascribed the word “genocide” to the goings-on in Gaza, not as a provocative cry —informed or not— on a college campus, but as a devastatingly reasonable label for the present moment. He wrote in the Forward: “Israel’s current actions are, to cite the [1948 Genocide] Convention, ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’ Unlike in 2023, there are now ample statements by Israeli ministers, military leaders, and former military leaders, that the strategic aim of the continued destruction of Gaza is, simply, to destroy Gaza and force much of its population to leave. This is ethnic cleansing, and this is genocide – an act committed to destroy, in part, a national group.” 

Days after his writing, Rabbi Michaelson was disinvited from a talk at a JCC in the Midwest and accused of libel. The idea of Israel’s actions “counting” as genocide, even if all the evidence pointed to such, was too painful for that particular JCC’s leadership to bear. It is so painful. And our history of having been the target of genocide does not discount us from being capable of attempting one. 

I have no doubt that people in the Jewish community care about innocent life, that even those of us who have the most ardent support for the state of Israel regret the toll of civilian casualties since October 7th. This, I’m sure, is why some of us are so relieved to find articles, no matter how dubious the source, describing horrors in Gaza as propaganda, and to point with disgust at Israel’s current administration in the same way that we do our immoral leaders here at home. 

But it is time to acknowledge the truth: Gaza’s suffering cannot be an afterthought to Jewish suffering.. The famine in Gaza— a famine that will not be relieved by the limited aid recently allowed in — is a moral stain that counts against our people. 

Our pain is real. Antisemitism is real. Hamas’s travesties, including the travesty of intercepting some aid before it can reach civilians, are real. All of these things count. 

And we must look back to Torah and see that, like Moses and Aaron, many of us are not taking a complete census. We have to count everything and everyone, even when that full count complicates things. 

According to Haaretz, as of today Israel had lost nearly 1900 people in the war— both soldiers and civilians. Each of these lives was a whole world, from the names we know well like Shiri Bibas and Hersh Goldberg-Pollin, to soldiers killed in the line of duty. Each of these people had people who loved them, had dreams and gifts and flaws and potential for a future far better than what they got. The impact of each of these losses cannot be counted. 

So, too, is the impact of the loss of each Palestinian child, and parent, and elder, and non-combatant. Tens of thousands killed by bombs, by bullets, by starvation. Tens of thousands. And the numbers grow each day. And many voices within the Israeli government want the numbers to keep growing. And we cannot discount the voices that hold most of the power. As American Jews, we are uniquely positioned to call out what's happening in Gaza and to ask our politicians to do everything in their power to get Israel to allow more humanitarian aid. 

When I prepared my lunch earlier this week, I couldn’t help but think that the food I was eating was the sort of food that Israelis eat, and that Palestinians would have enjoyed before the war. I couldn’t help but think that my plate— a full plate, fit for a nursing mother— was likely more food than many whole families would manage for a meal. I couldn’t help but think about the mothers in Gaza, wanting to feed their malnourished children and having a fraction of the calories needed. I do not know them, but I couldn’t help but count them as they have to count out spoonfuls of food, have to count the number of bombs falling nearby, have to count bodies of loved ones killed. I do not know them, but my heart breaks for them. I do not know them, but I weep for them, and I can’t hold back from plainly naming our responsibility to them. 

Tomorrow night, Jews around the world will gather for Shavuot, the culmination of 7 weeks of counting. Today, in the Kabbalistic interpretation of the Omer, is Yesod she’b’Malchut: foundation within sovereignty. The final sefira of the count, Malchut, is the one said to be closest to earth— the lowest point among the 10 sefirot. It is the manifestation of God said to unite with humanity every Shabbat. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our count ends with the sefira closest to us and that it ends with sovereignty. 

The omer count will end soon but the suffering will not. There is not a comfortable bow to tie here— an easy way to make everything better. All I can do is continue to ask us to count fully. Count the loss of innocents. Count the limbs of children, sometimes amputated without even anesthesia. Count the cries of wailing mothers in Gaza and in Israel. Count the hungry, both the dozens of remaining Israeli hostages and the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Count the anguish of your own heart. Count everything and everyone. A full accounting will hurt, but it will be true, and God willing it will help us to build our sovereignty this year and every year on a foundation of compassion.