Ki Tissa 5767 -- The Existence Triangle

The first commandment in this week’s parasha is the machatzit hashekel, the taking of the half-shekel from every male Israelite, age 20 and over. The Torah states explicitly that this taking of one coin from each and every army-eligible Israelite (how’s that for a string of vowels!) constitutes the proper means of taking the census. As parshanim explain, although they perhaps need not, all Moshe has to do is count his half-shekel coins, and it’s as good as counting Israelites. These half-shekels will also, the Torah tells us, be used as atonement money, and will be donated to Service in the Tent of Meeting.

What’s the connection between atonement, donation to the Ohel Moed, and the census? Says Sforno, the great Italian Torah scholar, counting and atonement for sins are intrinsically linked. God does not put them together here – rather, they always go together. To paraphrase that great German non-Torah scholar, Karl Marx, existence is sin. (One of Marx's witticism's, I believe, was that property is theft). When we count the numbers of extant Israelites, we are counting the number of those who sin. As we see in the incident of the Golden Calf in this week's parasha, sometimes those sins can be quite stunning. Since the very act of enumeration recalls our existence, and hence our sins, such an enumeration should contain the seeds of our forgiveness. In other words, before God has a chance to get really angry at us – and before we have a chance to get really angry at ourselves – for all of our human imperfection, we launch an atonement campaign with the half-shekel.

It is certainly nice to reflect upon God’s great kindness that seeks to forgive us even before we are finished uncovering our sins. However, we are still left with the idea that to exist is to sin. Sforno focuses (in my reading) on the use of the half shekel for atonement, but the half shekel has another function as well: it is a donation to God, to be used in the Tent of Meeting. I would therefore like to suggest a different equation, one that could be thought of as the opposite side of the triangle formed by the census, atonement, and donation to the Ohel Moed: To exist is to contribute.

This equation is actually made quite manifest by the details of the half-shekel mitzvah. Every army-aged Israelite must give a coin, and each Israelite, poor or rich, gave exactly a half-shekel, no more no less, which was donated to the Tent of Meeting. In other words, the very act of recognizing an individual’s existence contributed to the holy endeavors of the Tent of Meeting. The same is no doubt true in our own lives. Sin is part of human existence, but an equal, and probably greater, part is made up of the contributions that we make everyday to other people and to God.