The Story So Far

In Deuteronomy, Moses has several tasks, but chief among them is to set in motion the alchemical Jewish magic of storytelling. Moses gives the Israelites on the banks of the Jordan many instructions, cautions, promises, and blessings. But all of these important parts are nestled in a powerful whole - a story of ancestors descending to Egypt, becoming a people, enduring hardship, and leaving liberated in order to form a new social-spiritual enterprise. 

Most of the people Moses addresses didn’t actually leave Egypt themselves. It was their parents, the previous generation. If most of the books of Torah tell us a story of previous generations, Deuteronomy tells us a story of telling a story about previous generations, and because Moses passionately and eloquently weaves the people he addresses into their shared past and collective future, he addresses us too. We are hardly different from the people on the banks of the river between wilderness and home - we too are inheritors of experiences and traditions and sorrows and hopes. We too, stand on the precipice of what comes next.

But before we peer ahead, let’s look back once again.

בְּשִׁבְעִ֣ים נֶ֔פֶשׁ יָרְד֥וּ אֲבֹתֶ֖יךָ מִצְרָ֑יְמָה 
וְעַתָּ֗ה שָֽׂמְךָ֙ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ כְּכוֹכְבֵ֥י הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם לָרֹֽב׃
Your ancestors went down to Egypt seventy persons;
and now Adonai your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven. 
(Deuteronomy 10:22)

Although this is just a beginning, the number seventy heralds wholeness, completion, totality.
There are seventy nations. (Genesis 10)
Seventy elders support Moses. (Exodus 24, Numbers 11)
Seventy judges in the Sanhedrin (with one, like Moses, presiding). (Mishnah Sanhedrin 1:6)
Seventy faces of Torah, representing the diverse fullness of interpretation. (Bamidbar Rabbah 13:15)
Seventy is the age of “fullness”. (Pirkei Avot 5:21)

Which makes the commentary’s observation particularly surprising:

Here Moses mentions the number of Israelites descending to Egypt as being 70 whereas if you will check the number given in Genesis 46:27 you will find that actually only 69 are listed as leaving. (Rabbeinu Bachya)

Oops. When it comes to people, you can’t just round up to completion - if you are missing someone, something is wrong! Rabbeinu Bachya’s language is striking. Instead of literally saying sixty-nine, he says: לא מצאנו אלא שבעים חסר אחד, “We only found seventy-lacking-one.” That hammers home the wrongness of saying you’ve included everyone, but leaving one out. 

There are a number of suggestions for who was present but unlisted, each of which captures who we need to pay new attention to in order to return to communal wholeness. 

First, is Jacob himself! Apparently he wasn’t listed, and he was the patriarch of the family, the founder and leader. What might his erasure teach us? After all, most of the time our leaders are the most visible. In our attention economy, some measure success simply by how much others pay attention, through likes and subscribes, press coverage (no such thing as bad press), and site traffic or numbers in attendance. 

There are two divergent lessons here, one urging leaders to assert themselves more lest their “followers” find themselves in Egypt. According to this take, Jacob became too passive and all of the ills that befell his family trace themselves back to the leadership gap he created.

But alternatively we could learn that some of the greatest contributions leaders make happen behind the scenes, in quieter and subtler moments of connection, advice, presence, organization, thinking, and dreaming. The lesson then is a reminder to see those types of leaders and honor their essential work. 

A second option for who was present but unlisted is none other than God’s presence, the Shechinah herself. God says in Genesis 46:4, “I myself will go down with you…” What happens when we forget the need for spiritual presence in our human communities? (I’d love to hear your answers to this question, regardless of how you understand God and spirituality.)

Finally, a third option suggests either Yocheved, Moses’s mother, or Serach daughter of Asher. These two women, according to ancient traditions, lived very long lives and were crucial conduits of institutional knowledge. 

If it was Yocheved, she was present but not counted because she was still in her mother’s belly, awaiting birth at the gates of Egypt. What as-yet-unborn possibility will bring us closer to wholeness? How do we nourish and support those who conceive and carry hope?

If it was Serach, we have a strange problem. She was actually named in the list! And yet the midrash insists even so she was in fact the unnamed seventieth person. Every good story should be seasoned with a little mystery and myth…

However we fill in the gap, the gap remains. We say “seventy” but only see “sixty-nine”. 

We are a seventy-lacking-one society, overlooking those in the margins, the streets, the hospitals, the lonely homes, the borders of our country and our empathy. We subtract each other, on accident and by purpose. Through neglect and gunfire. When we forget that we are “lacking-one”, we descend to Mitzrayim, the “narrow place”. When we remember we are “lacking-one”, we can continue telling the story of liberation, even if we haven’t reached its conclusion yet. 

Sixty-nine isn’t the right word. Seventy-lacking-one is closer. But best, I think, is one-plus-one-plus-one-plus-one-plus-one… 

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say Weand know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more. (Marge Piercy, The Low Road)

Then all of a sudden, when one plus one plus one becomes seventy, when you and I and them too become we, the echo of Moses’s voice will drift out of the past, and the gloomy sky will be pierced by starlight, and we’ll realize what we’ve always known, we are standing here together on the precipice of what’s next. 

Shabbat shalom!

Rabbi Jay LeVine