Parashat BaMidbar Shabbat Evening

SERMON     Parashat BaMidbar     Young Families Shabbat

May 14, 2026   29 Iyyar 5786

Rabbi David Edleson   Temple Sinai   South Burlington, VT

NUMBERS  

This week’s Torah portion is all about numbers.   It is in fact the opening portion of the Book of – you guessed it – Numbers.  In it, God commands Moses and Aaron to do a lot of counting, to count, to take a census of all the Jewish people not once by twice.   What are some of the reasons we like to count things?  

Numbers matter.

How old are you?  We care about how old we are even when we say we don’t.   I just turned 65, and believe me, it matters. 

So in this week’s Torah story, God tells Moses to count everybody, to take a census.  Does that sound very spiritual?   Meaningful?  Religious?  It isn’t something that reveals life’s secret meaning.  It’s not very Tikkun Olam.    

Yet counting is important in Jewish life.  We count the days in the week – six – and then the seventh, Shabbat. 

And right now, we are in a time when Jews do a special counting of days between Passover, leaving Egypt, and Shavuot and the giving of the Torah.  It called counting the Omer and we’ve been doing it for thousands of years.

At Passover we count:  Who know one?  Echad Mi Yodea?

But counting is even more important than that to us.  How are we supposed to know how many people we need to care for.  How else will we know how many people we need to feed?  Find a place to sleep? Send to school?   Be ready to fight for us if needed?  We count. 

It might not sound that deep at first, but numbers can reveal things that help us be better people and make a better community.   To care for the people who need it most, we need to count and plan.    Numbers matter. 

In English, the book of the Torah we start this week is called Numbers, but in Hebrew, it has a different name.  It is called “BaMidbar - In the Wilderness.”  The wilderness is a place without roads and signs, so it’s easy to get lost or turned around.  It’s almost like the two names are telling us that without counting, without numbers, without facts, we can get turned around and confused about how best to move forward.   

It might also tell us something important about how we understand the world around us.   We need both numbers – facts – and we need our feelings – like feeling we are in a wilderness -   to understand where we are and what we need to do.

And next week we are celebrating an important number -  60.  Temple Sinai will be 60 years old next week, and that is an important number.  It’s half way to 120.  But I think the feeling-word that helps us understand what that birthday means is “lador vador   from generation to generation.”  That we are passing down this tradition from parents to children, again and again, for centuries.   Temple Sinai is for the people who started it, but they were planting seeds for future children whose parents weren’t even born yet. 

 It’s like the story of Honi who meets people planting fruit trees that won’t give fruit for 70 years!  He makes fun of them for doing it.   Why would you do that when you won’t get any fruit?     Then Honi falls asleep and sleeps for 70 years and when we wakes he sees young people planting the same trees.  He asks why they are doing it.   They answer that they are enjoying the fruit of the trees their grandparents planted for them, and now they are planting for the grandchildren.  

The Torah is called a tree of life, and we enjoy the fruit of learning that our grandparents planted for us, just as they enjoyed the fruits of learning of their grandparents.   Planting trees for future generation is how we find our way out of the wilderness, and may we continue to do this for more generations than we can count.

Shabbat Shalom.