Parashat Bamidbar - Counting What You Love

uh so with that being said we have parat bid we're starting a new book uh out of the five books of Moses and uh this is uh certainly a different type of book than we had the last book The Book of Leviticus is full of interesting laws although the Book of Leviticus you know ended with a couple of extraordinary stories and uh uh some very very dear warnings for those that uh still have not made up their mind of whether they want to live a holy life or not God simply stamps it into reality that anyone who doesn't will simply have to pay the bill uh at some point or another but the truth be told the uh the sages say why isn't Gom mentioned literally in the Torah itself and one of the reasons the rambam explains is that because the suffering that a person will endure during their life if they don't follow the Torah is detailed in the Torah one of the examples is in where all of those punishments are actually punishments of this world and anyone that has watched my lectures for the last 10 years knows that I've spoken about my personal story a few times uh discussing the different levels of suffering that bashem thank God uh we endured and certainly suffering has a lot of blessing to it if you actually understand what it's uh what's behind it and that's one of the things we actually learn uh from parat BB a initially when we look at it starts off with a commandment from God to do a census now one of the things that the sages teach us is that we see that God asks Moshe or commands Moshe to do a census several times this is not to say uh God forbid that uh you know he needed to know how many people are there because obviously he's Almighty he's omnipotent he's omnipresent he's everywhere he has no limitations but rather he wanted to show that he loves them and one of the ways that you express love for something is when you care about it you care about the quantity you care about the quality you know people that love money usually check their bank accounts and their uh stock portfolios and Bitcoins and any other asset that they have on a regular basis sometimes you'll see the same person checking their phone three or four times during that day just to see if anything changed in one of those accounts uh obviously their love for money is the prim reason behind it people that uh care about things count them and uh one of the things that hm wanted to show us multiple times throughout the Torah is that he loves us and he's counting us but in addition to that which we've discussed in previous years we see that there is a lot to learn from the names and the numbers we see that on one end the uh first thing is that the sensus has specific conditions where this senses includes everyone except the levy tribe the levy tribe is excluded they not counted as part of the senses they're counted later on but not as part of the senses they're excluded they are direct Servants of God and they have a specific position the second thing we see is that the leaders are identified by name multiple times and a third thing we see is also that the numbers between the different tribes vary drastically where you have the conditions where they're only counting in the census everyone from the age of 20 to 60 because these this is the age the sages explain this is the age of somebody being in the Army being able to go to war uh some like the ranan for example my nadis say that it's not because these are the ones that were able to go to war but rather because once you got out of your teenage years you're now officially considered an adult so and you could serve God at a higher level and so on but needless to say we see that there are names we see there are specific numbers the tribe of Yehuda is significantly bigger than the tribe of bamin and the others uh Dan is very big as well but again nowhere near as big uh as quantity as Yuda on the other hand the one tribe that is excluded from the the senses has different conditions not only are they excluded from the senses but you also see that the conditions are different where the senses for the levy tribe is from the age of 30 days old and up so in so many words including everyone that's out of life risk and the reason why we say life risk there is a alic uh uh term for a uh uh a child that's born within the first 30 days if the child uh in essence doesn't survive the first 30 days the burial requirements and so on are very different than if they are above 30 days old so we see that in essence the census for the levy tribe is in so many words everyone except the really really newborn the rest of the tribes which is everyone else everyone from the age of 20 to 60 which means that everyone under the age of 20 all the kids as well as all the women as well as all of the elders are excluded from the Census so you would think logically that the number of levies that are counted here would be significantly higher than everyone else and to your surprise and everyone else is they're actually the least in fact the ranan nakadi says that if the the conditions of the levy tribes census were the same as the rest of the tribes they wouldn't even amount to half of any of the tribes in total cuz some of the tribes are into 30,000 but again this is from age of 20 and up so we see here that the number of levies was very very few in comparison to everybody else why why are there so few levies furthermore what can we learn from the names that are mentioned here at least a few of them last but not least how does all of this affect us in our days today where we sometimes feel ourselves that the conditions in our life are a desert meaning they're empty of blessing full of difficulties and dangers just like the desert was full of scorpions snakes and all types of enemies like amalik uh that were trying to constantly attack is sometimes a person's life feels like that where he goes to work he works all day she goes to work she works all day they come back with a check that's just enough to pay the bills and sometimes not even where's the blessing he does whatever he has to to go on Aid date to find the perfect girl that's righteous she's good she's nice she comes from a good family she finds him he finds her obviously all the appropriate steps are taken and they don't uh do anything immoral or anything that's uh forbidden before marriage they finally get married and no kids or a big separation between the kids as if they have to invent a kid each time where's the blessing a person does whatever he can to build other people's companies he succeeds drastically and once he strikes out on his own he figures that he's going to have at the very least the same success if not more and sometimes he's surprised that not only the success is not the same as it used to be but rather failure seems almost like a definite why where is the blessing many times people ask about blessings in life most of the time they ask about blessings that are relevant to money to sustenance but needless to say there are blessings that are needed everywhere one of the things we're going to learn from is that strategically put us in the desert in the midbar in order to eliminate all possible distractions where even the Scorpions the snakes and anyone else that's outside of the camp was not able to attack US unless we let them in or in so many words let ourselves out so when the Amal wanted to attack us they couldn't enter the camp they had to attack whoever exited it anyone that left the camp and wanted to delve into the uh the the scenery of the desert outside of the camp many times got hurt why don't you just stay in it's safe it's it's holy it's good here well people always want to delve into things that are forbidden or perhaps beyond the uh you know the the knowledge that they already have as says stolen water are sweeter and people always want something that they can't have just like they if somebody would take one cup of water uh one bottle of water and pour two different cups one is his one of is his friends somehow if he takes his friend's drink also the second one tastes better why stolen water are sweeter it's forbidden and therefore it has that extra taste that is imaginary but needless to say makes the person have a certain type of dopamine pleasure that uh makes them feel good about what they did before they go into this into the uh uh regret [Applause] [Music] them