Bamidbar
Segregation, Torah Style
Segregating the Jewish people into distinct tribes, each living apart from the other and unique in its lifestyle, seems to run counter to our ideal of ‘Achdus’: unity among Jews. Yet the Torah takes great pride in this setup. Is division so beautiful?
The engine of a car is a wonderful machine made up of so many components, each interrelating with the other. For the engine to work, however, each part needs to be at a set distance from the others. Pushing the parts together would not improve it; rather it would ruin the engine!
So too, lumping all Jews together would not promote the unity of the nation, rather it would dysfunction it. As we are indeed disparate in function and nature, our creativity depends on our ability to operate at a distance where we do not smother one another or weaken another’s energies.
Segregation signals purposefulness: we work as one when we are separate.
Privileged And Responsible
The Torah explains that Hashem was justified in taking the Levi’im for they replaced the bechorim, consecrated when Hashem killed the Egyptian firstborn. Why does the Torah seek to justify Hashem choosing the Levi’im; had they not stood by Him when the rest of the Jews worshiped the Egel? Why did they need to be in place of the Bechorim?
The Levi’iim earned privileges, but they received obligations as well; they were obligated to work for Hashem, whether they wanted to or not. This is no bonus, nor loyalty prize. The Torah explains the obligation; they replaced the Bechorim, who were obligated to Hashem. That obligates the Levi’im as well.
The flip side of privilege must be responsibility.
Being Special
On counting the Jews, Hashem told Moshe to count Levi separately. Rashi explains that Hashem knew the Jews would sin and everyone in this counting would die. He wished to keep Levi out of the affair. So they were counted separately, and on a different basis; from the age of one month, in contrast to the Jews, counted from the age of twenty.
The pasuk then directs Moshe to appoint the Levi’im to the Mishkan service. Then comes the report of the actual counting of the Jews. Why interpose the Levi’im’s job detail in midst of counting the Jews?
To be considered different one must actually be different. Deciding to be different does not make one so. To justify counting the Levi’im separately, the Levi’im had to be indeed unique. They had a life-goal and function others did not share. Appointing them to the office of serving the Mishkan was not a diversion from the counting, rather it was the basis to counting them as a separate group.
Sometimes people who want to be special act different. The opposite is the case; we are different when we are special. We are special because of who we are, not because of our differences with others.
Covering The Aron
When traveling, the Kohanim covered the vessels with a blue cloth, and then with a tachash-skin. The Aron by contrast, was first covered by the peroches. Why was that?
The peroches was like a lead protector, – a nuclear radiation barrier, – that allowed the Aron to reside among the Jewish people without harming them by its energy it excluded. In fact, the Torah talks about the Peroches in sefer Shmos in terms of it being a protection. Even when travelling the Aron needed to be protected by this barrier.
Another suggestion is that the Aron was too holy to be ever seen. Instead of covering it directly, they just threw the peroches over it from outside the door, so that it was covered without it being handled at all.
How Many Jews?
The Torah counts the Jews as 603,550 men between 20 and 50 years of age. The Bechorim counted out to 22,273. They were counted as the Levi’im, from a month old and up. That means there was one male Bechor to every 27 males!
Young Bechorim tend to take up more of the family: a Bechor a year old equals 100% of the children in his family. Since the Bechorim were counted from one month old, the Bechorim were disproportionally more than the actual ratio. In addition, Bechorim were counted from one month but the Jews were counted from twenty years, meaning that there was an additional skewing in favor of Bechorim. The number of Bechorim is inflated. Yet there were one Bechor for every 27 ordinary male! Meaning that the real number is probably one Bechor every hundred! Wow!
Over in the Levi camp, there were 22,300 Levites, of whom 300 were Bechorim. That means that there was over 75 normal Levi’im for every Levi Bechor, even more than the Jews! (As mentioned, the real number of Bechrim among the Jews may also have been similar.)
What does all this mean? It means that the families they had were gigantic! This is consistent with the miracle recorded that they had six babes at every birth, so that in ten or eleven births there were so many children. This point is made by the Oznayim LaTorah.
Perhaps we can take things a bit farther: The real suffering in Egypt was only 86 years. (Rashi Shir Hashirim 2:13) We also know that according to Chazal only 1/5 or 1/50 or 1/500 left Egypt: the others were unworthy and died.
Lets take the figure of 1/5. Rashi says that one of out five left Egypt. There had once been five times the amount of Jews who left Egypt, only they died in the Makkah of Choshech.
Does that mean that each family had 135 children? That would entail 22.5 pregnancies if 6 children came at a shot. Twenty two pregnancies is a lot at any standard. Perhaps there were entire families that died: there were good families in Klal Yisroel and bad ones. The bad died off entirely and the good ones remained. The bad ones were four times the good ones.
86 years constitutes 3 or 4 childbearing cycles, 3 or 4 generations. Taking only the bald numbers the Torah is explicit about – 27 children in each family, we may infer that the generation before the one that left Egypt consisted of 1/27th the amount of people, i.e. 27,353. The one before that had merely 827 individuals. And the one before that, assuming four generations of 6 per birth, had only 30. That is pretty impossible, considering that they stated with 70!
So we must work with the 5x standard; 603,550 x5 = 3,017,750. A generation beforehand they had 111,768, a generation more: 4,139 and in the fourth generation: 153. Still highly improbable being that the original 70 had 124 years to propagate. The Torah tells us that the Jews became very many, filling the land. That does not sound like 153 individuals, methinks. And the six-fold births are recorded at the beginning – when Yosef still lived!
So I am having trouble mapping out a scheme that would allow for six-fold births yet account for the fewness of the Jews leaving Egypt. Unless they had six at a time, but only one or two pregnancies?
Any thoughts?
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