Last week, a day or two before Shabbat I watched a television interview with Colonel Golan Vach, one of the commanders of the Israeli rescue and recovery mission in Surfside Florida. The interviewer for CNN asked Colonel Vach about recent developments in their rescue and recovery efforts. “I heard that you found bodies yesterday,” the reporter asked. Vach responded “We found people. Unfortunately they were not alive.” Every time that the reporter made reference to “bodies” being recovered from the building site, Colonel Vach would interject and subtly offer a correction, “we found people, unfortunately they were not alive.”
I was so struck by his humane insistence that the deceased victims of the building collapse retain the dignity inherent in being a person and cannot be reduced to being mere “bodies.” They remain people, even when they are no longer alive. This is one of the core ideas that I share whenever I officiate a funeral – even after death we treat human bodies, even fragments of bodies, with loving care and with true awe and reverence as is appropriate given that we were created, somehow body and soul, in the image of God.
“We found people. Unfortunately they were not alive.”
This Shabbat we concluded Sefer Bamidbar, The Book of Numbers. Sefer Bamidbar is called Sefer Bamidbar because it takes place…BaMidbar – in the desert and the opening verse of the book proclaims: וַיְדַבֵּ֨ר ה אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֛ה בְּמִדְבַּ֥ר סִינַ֖י that God spoke to Moshe in the Sinai Desert…” The name of the book in English, based on the Greek name of the book, Numeroi, comes from all of the numbers that appear in the book, specifically a large census at the beginning of the book and another large census in the final chapters.
Rashi points out that the frequent counting of the Israelite population in the Torah is a reflection of God’s love for us. מִתּוֹךְ חִבָּתָן לְפָנָיו מוֹנֶה אוֹתָם כָּל שָׁעָה Because of how beloved they were before God, God counted them at every juncture. Each census that appears in the Torah, in Sefer Shmot and in Sefer Bamidbar, is an expression of God’s love that is demonstrated by the careful counting of each individual.
We are rightly concerned about the risk of reducing people to numbers. Whenever we encounter a large number of people, whether it is 150 missing in Surfside or 600,000 American covid deaths, or 6,000,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices we worry about forgetting the individuals behind those numbers.
Even when conducting a census for a positive reason, we are wary to count individuals and reduce them to numbers. , The Torah presents the collection of the half-shekel as the only valid method of determining the number of Jews, King David was severely punished, with a plague, for conducting a census, and when we count Jewish men to see if a minyan is in the room there is a custom to count “not one, not two” or by reciting a verse or phrase with ten words, “Hoshe’a Et Amecha…” My kids like to use “Old MacDonald Had a Farm…” which also has ten words.
Rashi offers us a different perspective on counting. Alongside the legitimate concern about reducing people to a number, is the possibility that people, when alive and when no longer alive, can be lovingly counted. That is what gives the Book of Numbers its name. The Israelites were not reduced to a number, they were lovingly counting. This is what Golan Vach was conveying to the reporter. His team was not collecting bodies so that casualties could be tallied, his team was lovingly counting the people whom he found; unfortunately they were not alive.
The New York Times article, which was in last Shabbat’s print edition, also highlighted the efforts of the Israeli search and rescue team. The article ended with a description of the motivation of a senior member of the Israeli delegation:
The deputy commander of the Israeli team, Elad Edri, 40, said he planned to work through the Jewish Sabbath … for the third time in his life. He had previously worked through the weekend during the 2017 earthquake in Mexico and the 2015 earthquake in Nepal.
“We will save lives — by saying ‘save lives,’ it’s not only the lives of the trapped, it’s the families,” Mr. Edri said, adding that a lot of the families were trapped not knowing where their relatives are. He added, “it’s better for them to know.”
It is generally not my practice to second-guess or pass judgement on halakhic positions as portrayed in newspaper articles. I don’t know if halakhah permits Shabbat desecration for the purpose of finding and identifying people who are no longer alive. The Talmud, as many of us saw just last week in daf-yomi, suggests that excavation work ceases when we are certain that there are no living people trapped under the rubble.
But Elad Edri, whether halachically correct or mistaken, is absolutely correct that there is significant value to surviving families when they know that their loved ones have been found and that the process of preparing for burial and for mourning can commence.
The solace families receive is the solace of knowing that their deceased loved ones were not just a number. The efforts of the rescue and recovery teams were conducted with professionalism and they were conducted with love. The solace they received was knowing that their deceased parent, sibling, spouse, or child was longingly counted and not just a number.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 