Drasha
Maybe it’s just because the anxiety of tax season is on my mind, but the last thing I wanted to read about this morning was long accounts of numbers and calculations. Yet, the beginning of Sefer BaMidbar, the aptly titled Book of Numbers, is all about lists and lists of census data and number calculations. The Jewish people are counted, and then the Leviim are counted, and counted again. Why is all of this necessary? First of all, why are the Leviim counted separately from the Jewish people? And second of all, why are they counted twice? Once in our Parshah, and then once again in next week’s Parshah!?
On a simple level, I think we can understand why the Leviim are counted separately from the Jewish people in our Parshah. We are told that the census is specifically for the purposes of counting Kol Yotzei Tzeva BeYisrael, all men who are fit to go out to war. In other words, the census is really a step of military preparation, as the Jewish people prepare their army before kicking off their campaign to conquer the land of Israel. The Levites, though, are not included in this count because they do not go out to war. The tribe of Levi in singled out as the only tribe that does not wage war, but rather, stays back to guard the Mishkan. Therefore, they are not included in the military census.
On some level, this need for a division of labor makes sense. We just spent chapters and chapters in VaYikra learning about the various forms of impurity that render one prohibited from entering the Temple or being close to God. Surely war, with its brutal nature, would render most of its participants impure and needing distance from the Mishkan. Therefore, some from amongst the Jewish people need to be designated to watch over the Temple and ensure its purity. We know the Kohanim are obviously not going to war, but at this point, that’s hardy even a Minyan’s worth of people. The Kohanim cannot take care of the temple alone during a period of war, so the Leviim are appointed to assist with the Mishkan. ... continued
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