Rabbi Daniel Siegel – Head of Jewish Life

Being Torah

This week’s parashah opens with the command to conduct a census of the Israelites now encamped in Midbar Sinai – the wilderness of Sinai. Accordingly, the book is called Numbers in English and Sefer Pekudim (The Book of Counting), in Rabbinic tradition.

The final tally (pekudim) we are told is 603,550. The famous Hasidic Rebbe, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev (1740–1809) notes that this final count corresponds to the total number of letters in the Torah. As the Torah, tradition maintains, was given at the iconic mountain of this wilderness, one can see the ready connection that the Berditcher Rebbe draws, between the census of the Israelites and the revelation taking place within the same region.

However, a count of the letters in the Torah yields the number 304,805. Levi Yitzckak, though, is concerned with exploring truths rather than recounting facts.

There is a tradition, that when a Sefer Torah is commissioned by a synagogue, each of its members writes a letter in the scroll or sponsors the sofer/scribe to do so on her/his behalf; both practices testifying that our Torah is a communal document reflective of a shared way of life, to which we all contribute.

This Rebbe, however, may be asking us to cull more from his suggestive words. Perhaps, we are all letters of the Torah, its living embodiment. In which case, the Torah has no life outside of us who are called upon to be Torah. The Torah is a ‘Tree of Life’ in terms of its organic nature-the roots, trunk and branches of a tradition that lives through us.

Significantly, the last of the 613 commandments is for each of us to write a Sefer Torah. The Rabbis declare that writing a Sefer Torah constitutes receiving it at Sinai. Beyond the physical act of writing, living Torah by being Torah would make us true scribes of the Sefer Torah. In doing so, we are enacting the Sinaitic revelation through(out) our lives and that of our community.

Like our ancestors, the true census of our people is to be reckoned not by numbers but by the life each of us leads.