Dvar Torah BaMidbar 5785
When I was trained to be a rabbi in beginning in 2001 at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, in our second year lifecycles class, we were trained in the basics of converting people to Judaism. The majority of folks converting at that time were converting for marriage to a Jewish partner. The couples took the class together, and a few singles took it out of a purely religious and spiritual interest in joining the faith of Abraham and Sarah. But I want you to hold this thought about the makeup and popularity of classes for conversion to judaism. Put a pin in it. We will come back to it.
At that time, in 2001, the Jewish community was still all in a tizzy about the 1990 Jewish population survey which revealed high levels of intermarriage - around 40%. Affiliation rates to American synagogues were in decline. And overall, there was a deep and abiding concern about the demographic future of the Jewish community - about whether the American Jewish community, due to falling affiliation, falling birthrates, rising intermarriage, and general apathy, were slowly going to decline to oblivion. In his talks at youth conventions and hebrew school teacher symposia in this era, a beloved rabbi and teacher of mine used to take any available opportunities to cajole the assembled young people with these words on falling birth rates: he would say “your doing Hitler’s work for them.” He was eventually convinced this was not a compelling way to reach the young people to compel them to marry young and have lots of kids.
Nonetheless, 24 years later, the same anxieties exist in the Jewish community today about our numbers, our size, and our lack of domestic growth. It is a concern, or at least a worthwhile question, that our people have had for more than 3000 years.
Parshat bamidbar famously begins with a census, saying
שְׂאוּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ כׇּל־עֲדַת בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָם לְבֵית אֲבֹתָם בְּמִסְפַּר שֵׁמוֹת כׇּל־זָכָר לְגֻלְגְּלֹתָם׃
“Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head.”
In short, the Torah tells us: count up the numbers. And list the names.
Now, this is not the only census the Israelites have been asked to do. There’s a census in Exodus 30, and another in Numbers 26, and one for the priests in Numbers 4. And different commentators either think these are different censuses - one for all people, another for military aged males - or that they are repeated versions of the same census.
The question then, and now, is this: how many of us are there? Are we growing, or shrinking, as a people? And perhaps, most importantly, what does that say about us? The fundamental anxiety revealed in the census, either the one in the desert 3000 years ago or the last Pew Survey of American Jews in 2020, is whether our children and our grandchildren will be Jewish; whether we as a people will shrink and shrivel away in this country to nothing. I think the answer is no. I think there are two reasons for this, which are actually intertwined.
First, the problem with a quantitative measure of Judaism is that it isn’t a qualitative measure of Judaism. By that I mean a survey that asks someone if they are Jewish doesn’t really tell you much about why they are Jewish, or how being Jewish is important to them. A person could tell the Pew survey, yes, I am Jewish. And the follow up question of ‘why’ might result in them saying ‘well my parents are Jewish. But I’ve never been to Hebrew school, I don’t go to synagogue, I don’t celebrate Hanukkah or Passover, and I don’t know anything about our religion or traditions.’ And its not that this person is doing anything wrong - they’re simply living their life. Their approach to Judaism is based on our historic tribal ethnic Jewishness. It is the conversation that folks had with my generation of Jews about what was important going forward. We were told that should meet a nice Jewish girl and get married and have Jewish children. And if we stopped to asked why, the answer was a fairly straightforward ‘so your children will be Jews.’ Quantity. But the question of what our Judaism consisted of was secondary.
Let me say it another way. For years I got to sit on a three rabbi panel with confirmation kids at Temple Emanuel in Denver. And the kids had to prepare questions and ask all three rabbis. And pretty much every year one card would be pulled and the question would be posed to me: why should I be Jewish? And other rabbis gave answers about tradition or family or community or God or chosenness, and they were good answers. My answer was this: be Jewish, don’t be Jewish, it doesn’t matter to me. But I think the Torah holds the secrets to how to live a meaningful life. And because studying Torah and commentaries is literally all I do all day, every day, aside from calling page numbers sometimes on Saturday mornings, I have the secret to living a meaningful life. If you want it, I will share it with anyone that is interested. If you aren’t interested, that’s totally ok too. It’s your life, you get to live it how you like.
Now that is a qualitative answer, and based on an approach to Judaism that regards it much more as a spiritual practice than a religion. It is, for some, a slightly heretical answer. In my day, being Jewish and carrying forward the tradition was expected, and the way to compel that expectation was often guilt, or expectation. ‘I did it, so you will do it.’ My answer of ‘it’s up to you, it’s your life’ - some people don’t like it because I’m not strident enough. And also, maybe, if I tell 10 kids they can chose if they want to live Jewishly or not, maybe only 5 chose to do it. Maybe it’s not a demographically successful approach. But looking at the trends nationally, Jews today are not basing their life decisions on whether their children will be ethnically Jewish - whether they will have two Jewish parents. The Pew Survey in 2020 showed that of Jews that married from 1990 to 1999, 37% had a non Jewish spouse. For Jews married from 2000 to 2009, 45% had a non Jewish spouse. For Jews married from 2010 to 2019, 61% had a non Jewish spouse. So as things move forward, fewer kids are growing up in households with two Jewish parents, and those kids are often not being raised to be Jewish. The Pew survey noted that when surveyed, 91% families with two Jewish parents reported that they were raising their children Jewish by religion. In families with only one Jewish parent, only 29% were raising their kids to be Jewish by religion.
These numbers might alarm you. They do not particularly alarm me. And that’s because they effectively fit the philosophy I described of why to be Jewish. It’s a spiritual practice of seeking the meaning of life, and the fact that some people opt out, or aren’t raised even knowing about opting in, is just part of living in a modern American society with infinite choice. We can’t effectively compel with guilt, or with a lack of alternatives today. Lots of Americans today are opting out of religion. If you were born Jewish in Minsk in 1889, there weren’t a lot of other lifestyle options available to you. Today, you can be, or not be, whatever you want.
But that brings me back to conversion, and introduction to Judaism. Some of you know, but many of you do not, that I’ve been the Director of Intro to Judaism for the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association for the past three years. ITJ as it is know is Pittsburgh’s course for conversion, or simply learning the basics of Judaism, for almost all the liberal synagogues in Western Pennsylvania. When I started teaching the class in 2019 we had roughly 10 students, and Sinai had roughly 10, and Rodef had 10. In 2022 we combined efforts across all the synagogues in the area and had about 30 students. In 2023 we taught about 45 students. This past year the number of students rose to 56. These rises track with what I experienced in Denver Colorado from 2011 to 2018 - every year we saw more ITJ students and more converts. My last year there, we were running two cohorts of students totalling 110 students. More and more people who learn about Judaism see it as a compelling religious and spiritual practice, and more and more people are converting not because their partner is Jewish and they want to raise the kids Jewish, but because they find Judaism compelling, and they want to live Jewishly, and they want their kids to grow up Jewish.
And it’s beautiful. I’m so lucky to have a front row seat to so many people who come to Judaism on their own. In the words of the Talmud “Those born as Jews may trace their lineage to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but the religious pedigree of sincere converts to Judaism derives directly from the Creator.”
Over the last 13 years I’ve been involved in ITJ, I’m seeing fewer couples take the class, but more singles. I want to add on this day which is the beginning of LGBTQIA pride weekend in Pittsburgh, that a significant number of folks who choose to become Jewisg identify as queer or trans. That’s for two reasons: first, the liberal movements in Judaism are welcoming and affirming to the LGBT community. And two, especially for the trans community, for many of them that are in the process of coming into themselves fully and taking on a new name or transitioning to a gender identity other than the one assigned at birth, they now have the freedom to explore a totally new identity, and that includes their religion. And they often chose Judaism.
You might then ask - well, demographically, will the number of born Jews that stop practicing Judaism be replaced by folks converting into Judaism? That I do not know, and I don’t think it matters. Because again, it’s about the qualitative measure of an individual person's life, and not the overall numbers. And that brings me back to our parsha, which tells us in Numbers 1 that we are to count up the numbers. And list the names.
The Meor Eynayim - Rabbi Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl , died in 1797 taught the following regarding the numbers and the names. He said:
Hashem Yitborach - our Holy God - sends out the host (angels) to count, and there can not be even one missing Aleph from among them, has veShalom, that they absolutely must always be whole.
And the end of the verse says they are called by their names - for a person’s name is their essence and soul. For the letters of one’s name are their root and their life force. And by them, one serves God, and learns, and prays.
In other words, the reason God commands Moses to write out the names of the Israelites is because each and every one of us that counts ourselves as a Jew, God records our names and does not miss even a letter of a single person, because our Hebrew name is our soul, our root and our life force - in Hebrew, shemo shel adam hu nishmato, shoresho vechiuto . If we pursue Torah we hold the secret to life.
Not everyone is going to chose Judaism. But so many people do - both folks born to Jewish parents and folks that are not. My point is: Judaism is not going anywhere. It meaningful and beautiful, and people have sought out its wisdom for thousands of years. Regardless of how many or how few choose to live a Jewish life, as long as human beings seek meaning and joy and purpose, Judaism will exist, and for the people that chose it, those born Jewish and those who come to it later, Judaism will thrive.
As we come to Shavuot and reenact Sinai, Jews get to receive Torah all over again for themselves, and take stock of what that means. And of course, our additional reading for Shavuot will be the book of Ruth, the story of a woman who finds personal meaning and common cause with the Jewish people and explains ‘your people are my people, you God is my God.’ BaMidbar - Numbers - is the parsha of demographic counting, but the texts asks us to give over our names, one by one, to God. And Shavuot is the holiday of the convert - when we all stand at sinai and get to chose Judaism again, and rediscover the secret to life. Shabbat Shalom.
When I was trained to be a rabbi in beginning in 2001 at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, in our second year lifecycles class, we were trained in the basics of converting people to Judaism. The majority of folks converting at that time were converting for marriage to a Jewish partner. The couples took the class together, and a few singles took it out of a purely religious and spiritual interest in joining the faith of Abraham and Sarah. But I want you to hold this thought about the makeup and popularity of classes for conversion to judaism. Put a pin in it. We will come back to it.
At that time, in 2001, the Jewish community was still all in a tizzy about the 1990 Jewish population survey which revealed high levels of intermarriage - around 40%. Affiliation rates to American synagogues were in decline. And overall, there was a deep and abiding concern about the demographic future of the Jewish community - about whether the American Jewish community, due to falling affiliation, falling birthrates, rising intermarriage, and general apathy, were slowly going to decline to oblivion. In his talks at youth conventions and hebrew school teacher symposia in this era, a beloved rabbi and teacher of mine used to take any available opportunities to cajole the assembled young people with these words on falling birth rates: he would say “your doing Hitler’s work for them.” He was eventually convinced this was not a compelling way to reach the young people to compel them to marry young and have lots of kids.
Nonetheless, 24 years later, the same anxieties exist in the Jewish community today about our numbers, our size, and our lack of domestic growth. It is a concern, or at least a worthwhile question, that our people have had for more than 3000 years.
Parshat bamidbar famously begins with a census, saying
שְׂאוּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ כׇּל־עֲדַת בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָם לְבֵית אֲבֹתָם בְּמִסְפַּר שֵׁמוֹת כׇּל־זָכָר לְגֻלְגְּלֹתָם׃
“Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head.”
In short, the Torah tells us: count up the numbers. And list the names.
Now, this is not the only census the Israelites have been asked to do. There’s a census in Exodus 30, and another in Numbers 26, and one for the priests in Numbers 4. And different commentators either think these are different censuses - one for all people, another for military aged males - or that they are repeated versions of the same census.
The question then, and now, is this: how many of us are there? Are we growing, or shrinking, as a people? And perhaps, most importantly, what does that say about us? The fundamental anxiety revealed in the census, either the one in the desert 3000 years ago or the last Pew Survey of American Jews in 2020, is whether our children and our grandchildren will be Jewish; whether we as a people will shrink and shrivel away in this country to nothing. I think the answer is no. I think there are two reasons for this, which are actually intertwined.
First, the problem with a quantitative measure of Judaism is that it isn’t a qualitative measure of Judaism. By that I mean a survey that asks someone if they are Jewish doesn’t really tell you much about why they are Jewish, or how being Jewish is important to them. A person could tell the Pew survey, yes, I am Jewish. And the follow up question of ‘why’ might result in them saying ‘well my parents are Jewish. But I’ve never been to Hebrew school, I don’t go to synagogue, I don’t celebrate Hanukkah or Passover, and I don’t know anything about our religion or traditions.’ And its not that this person is doing anything wrong - they’re simply living their life. Their approach to Judaism is based on our historic tribal ethnic Jewishness. It is the conversation that folks had with my generation of Jews about what was important going forward. We were told that should meet a nice Jewish girl and get married and have Jewish children. And if we stopped to asked why, the answer was a fairly straightforward ‘so your children will be Jews.’ Quantity. But the question of what our Judaism consisted of was secondary.
Let me say it another way. For years I got to sit on a three rabbi panel with confirmation kids at Temple Emanuel in Denver. And the kids had to prepare questions and ask all three rabbis. And pretty much every year one card would be pulled and the question would be posed to me: why should I be Jewish? And other rabbis gave answers about tradition or family or community or God or chosenness, and they were good answers. My answer was this: be Jewish, don’t be Jewish, it doesn’t matter to me. But I think the Torah holds the secrets to how to live a meaningful life. And because studying Torah and commentaries is literally all I do all day, every day, aside from calling page numbers sometimes on Saturday mornings, I have the secret to living a meaningful life. If you want it, I will share it with anyone that is interested. If you aren’t interested, that’s totally ok too. It’s your life, you get to live it how you like.
Now that is a qualitative answer, and based on an approach to Judaism that regards it much more as a spiritual practice than a religion. It is, for some, a slightly heretical answer. In my day, being Jewish and carrying forward the tradition was expected, and the way to compel that expectation was often guilt, or expectation. ‘I did it, so you will do it.’ My answer of ‘it’s up to you, it’s your life’ - some people don’t like it because I’m not strident enough. And also, maybe, if I tell 10 kids they can chose if they want to live Jewishly or not, maybe only 5 chose to do it. Maybe it’s not a demographically successful approach. But looking at the trends nationally, Jews today are not basing their life decisions on whether their children will be ethnically Jewish - whether they will have two Jewish parents. The Pew Survey in 2020 showed that of Jews that married from 1990 to 1999, 37% had a non Jewish spouse. For Jews married from 2000 to 2009, 45% had a non Jewish spouse. For Jews married from 2010 to 2019, 61% had a non Jewish spouse. So as things move forward, fewer kids are growing up in households with two Jewish parents, and those kids are often not being raised to be Jewish. The Pew survey noted that when surveyed, 91% families with two Jewish parents reported that they were raising their children Jewish by religion. In families with only one Jewish parent, only 29% were raising their kids to be Jewish by religion.
These numbers might alarm you. They do not particularly alarm me. And that’s because they effectively fit the philosophy I described of why to be Jewish. It’s a spiritual practice of seeking the meaning of life, and the fact that some people opt out, or aren’t raised even knowing about opting in, is just part of living in a modern American society with infinite choice. We can’t effectively compel with guilt, or with a lack of alternatives today. Lots of Americans today are opting out of religion. If you were born Jewish in Minsk in 1889, there weren’t a lot of other lifestyle options available to you. Today, you can be, or not be, whatever you want.
But that brings me back to conversion, and introduction to Judaism. Some of you know, but many of you do not, that I’ve been the Director of Intro to Judaism for the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association for the past three years. ITJ as it is know is Pittsburgh’s course for conversion, or simply learning the basics of Judaism, for almost all the liberal synagogues in Western Pennsylvania. When I started teaching the class in 2019 we had roughly 10 students, and Sinai had roughly 10, and Rodef had 10. In 2022 we combined efforts across all the synagogues in the area and had about 30 students. In 2023 we taught about 45 students. This past year the number of students rose to 56. These rises track with what I experienced in Denver Colorado from 2011 to 2018 - every year we saw more ITJ students and more converts. My last year there, we were running two cohorts of students totalling 110 students. More and more people who learn about Judaism see it as a compelling religious and spiritual practice, and more and more people are converting not because their partner is Jewish and they want to raise the kids Jewish, but because they find Judaism compelling, and they want to live Jewishly, and they want their kids to grow up Jewish.
And it’s beautiful. I’m so lucky to have a front row seat to so many people who come to Judaism on their own. In the words of the Talmud “Those born as Jews may trace their lineage to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but the religious pedigree of sincere converts to Judaism derives directly from the Creator.”
Over the last 13 years I’ve been involved in ITJ, I’m seeing fewer couples take the class, but more singles. I want to add on this day which is the beginning of LGBTQIA pride weekend in Pittsburgh, that a significant number of folks who choose to become Jewisg identify as queer or trans. That’s for two reasons: first, the liberal movements in Judaism are welcoming and affirming to the LGBT community. And two, especially for the trans community, for many of them that are in the process of coming into themselves fully and taking on a new name or transitioning to a gender identity other than the one assigned at birth, they now have the freedom to explore a totally new identity, and that includes their religion. And they often chose Judaism.
You might then ask - well, demographically, will the number of born Jews that stop practicing Judaism be replaced by folks converting into Judaism? That I do not know, and I don’t think it matters. Because again, it’s about the qualitative measure of an individual person's life, and not the overall numbers. And that brings me back to our parsha, which tells us in Numbers 1 that we are to count up the numbers. And list the names.
The Meor Eynayim - Rabbi Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl , died in 1797 taught the following regarding the numbers and the names. He said:
Hashem Yitborach - our Holy God - sends out the host (angels) to count, and there can not be even one missing Aleph from among them, has veShalom, that they absolutely must always be whole.
And the end of the verse says they are called by their names - for a person’s name is their essence and soul. For the letters of one’s name are their root and their life force. And by them, one serves God, and learns, and prays.
In other words, the reason God commands Moses to write out the names of the Israelites is because each and every one of us that counts ourselves as a Jew, God records our names and does not miss even a letter of a single person, because our Hebrew name is our soul, our root and our life force - in Hebrew, shemo shel adam hu nishmato, shoresho vechiuto . If we pursue Torah we hold the secret to life.
Not everyone is going to chose Judaism. But so many people do - both folks born to Jewish parents and folks that are not. My point is: Judaism is not going anywhere. It meaningful and beautiful, and people have sought out its wisdom for thousands of years. Regardless of how many or how few choose to live a Jewish life, as long as human beings seek meaning and joy and purpose, Judaism will exist, and for the people that chose it, those born Jewish and those who come to it later, Judaism will thrive.
As we come to Shavuot and reenact Sinai, Jews get to receive Torah all over again for themselves, and take stock of what that means. And of course, our additional reading for Shavuot will be the book of Ruth, the story of a woman who finds personal meaning and common cause with the Jewish people and explains ‘your people are my people, you God is my God.’ BaMidbar - Numbers - is the parsha of demographic counting, but the texts asks us to give over our names, one by one, to God. And Shavuot is the holiday of the convert - when we all stand at sinai and get to chose Judaism again, and rediscover the secret to life. Shabbat Shalom.
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