From Head Counting to Healthy Community
Parashat Shekalim, Exodus 30:11–16
Rabbi Russ Resnik
Leaders like to count heads. The US government has conducted a census every ten years since 1790, based on Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, and even the theocracy established in Israel ages earlier required a census. The Torah’s guidelines for this census are surprisingly relevant to creating healthy communities today.
In Exodus 30:11–16, Hashem instructs Moses to take a count of the tribes of Israel. We read these instructions each year on Shabbat Shekalim, the first of four special Shabbats leading up to Passover, as the Jewish Study Bible explains:
In Second Temple times [these instructions] became the basis of an annual impost for maintaining the Temple. . . . Since the payment was due in the month of Adar (early spring), in order to announce it the present law, called “the Section concerning Shekels” (Parashat Shekalim), was added to the weekly Torah reading on the Sabbath of, or preceding, the New Moon of Adar (m. Meg. 3.4), and the Sabbath is called “the Sabbath of Shekels” (Shabbat Shekalim).
We’ve kept the custom of reading Parashat Shekalim for over nineteen centuries, to remember the half-shekel ransom paid at this season every year since the destruction of the Temple. The Temple is gone, the priesthood scattered, but we maintain this tradition, which helps maintain us as a people, a living community. As we follow these readings in the micro-community of Messianic Judaism, we express our solidarity with the macro-community of Israel through the ages.
The instructions in Parashat Shekalim open with this:
And the Lord spoke to Moses, “When you count heads for the Israelites according to their numbers, every man shall give ransom for his life to the Lord when they are counted, that there be no scourge among them when they are counted.” (Exod 30:11–12)
Counting heads, apparently, is a perilous business. When you take a census, each person has to give a ransom (or atonement, kopher) for his life. Why is this? Throughout the ancient Near East, a fear of exposure to malevolent forces was connected to counting people, and this might be in the background here. Counting implies ownership, which can stir up jealousy and mischief in the demonic realm. Before we write this off as superstition, we need to recognize the reality of an unseen realm in which spiritual forces are at work, for ill as well as good. And there’s another substantial truth here. Counting implies ownership, which risks making persons into objects, into quantities instead of souls of infinite value.
On one level, then, paying the ransom avoids directly counting people, so that we total the weight of silver (shekel is originally not a coin but a measure of weight), not the actual number of human beings. “This practice survives in a Jewish custom for determining whether a prayer quorum (‘minyan’) of ten is present: ten words of a biblical verse, rather than numbers, are applied to those being counted” (Jewish Study Bible).
But why a ransom or atonement exactly? Because every person belongs to Hashem, but the one who counts might think they belong to him. This may be the background to the story of David’s disastrous census in 2 Samuel 24. When humans take count of Israel, they are required to pay a ransom (kopher) to signify that each person actually belongs to the Lord.
This custom strikes me as an essential key to healthy community and to healthy family as well—the first key of four I’ll outline.
1. The community (or family) needs human leaders, but it belongs to God.
When we’re introduced to a new congregation, one of the first questions we’re liable to ask is how many members it has. We want to quantify it, and that’s not altogether irrelevant, but we need to guard against quantifying people, turning them into objects to be tallied up as if they belonged to us. And those of us in leadership, as much as we love and devote ourselves to the congregation, need to remember who it really belongs to.
As we continue through the instructions of Shekalim, we learn a second key to healthy community.
2. Every member has something essential to contribute.
“This shall each who undergoes the count give: half a shekel by the shekel of the sanctuary—twenty gerahs to the shekel, a donation to the Lord. Whosoever undergoes the count from twenty years old and up shall give the Lord’s donation.” (Exod 30:13–14)
Every person brings a “donation” or terumah, with the word repeated three times in verses 13, 14, and 15. When the idea of terumah was introduced earlier, in Parashat Terumah, it was defined as a freewill offering, from the heart, not a tax or fee, but a matter of lifting up to God, as its name implies (Exod 25:2).
Each member has something essential to contribute to the community. And yet, paradoxically, the donation is the same amount for every person.
“The rich man shall not give more and the poor man shall not give less than a half a shekel [when they give a terumah to the Lord] to atone for their lives.” (Exod 30:15)
This is our third key to healthy community.
3. The same inherent value applies to every single member.
The same honor and respect are due to each member. Each one bears the divine image, and answers to the same Shepherd, regardless of socio-economic or religious status, and regardless of how much or how little they appear to contribute. And this leads to our fourth key.
4. The community is sustained by the gifts of all its members.
“And you shall take the atonement money from the Israelites and set it for the service of the Tent of Meeting, and it shall be a remembrance for the Israelites before the Lord to atone for their lives.” (Exod 30:16)
The offerings are not one-time gifts, but gifts that enable the ongoing service of the holy place, demonstrating that healthy community requires the steady contribution of each member. No one is a spectator or a consumer in the house of Hashem, and this full-bodied contribution is a “remembrance” for every member “before the Lord.” It provides atonement, keeping each member close to him.
■
Rav Shaul applies these principles to the Messianic community:
Speaking the truth in love, we will in every respect grow up into him who is the head, the Messiah. Under his control, the whole body is being fitted and held together by the support of every joint, with each part working to fulfill its function; this is how the body grows and builds itself up in love. (Eph 4:15–16 CJB)
Not only does “each part” have an essential function, but the whole community belongs to Messiah as a body belongs to its head. In the Tabernacle community of Exodus, the gifts of each member constitute a “remembrance before the Lord.” In Messiah these gifts also constitute the very growth and building up of his body. Healthy community isn’t just a collection of countable heads, but a living remembrance of the Messiah who gives it life.
Citations of Exodus are from Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses.
Illustration: cubiclebydesign.com.