TRADITION Questions: What Counts?

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What is it?

“How large is your shul?” Nearly everyone will answer this question with an approximate number of families (or “membership units”). That’s what synagogues report at board meetings and on their websites. It holds true across denominations.

Why does it matter?

We measure what matters. In reporting the size of our shuls by families, we prioritize and normalize families as the essential unit through which we think about Jewish communal life. In counting families, we do not count individual neshamot, souls.

Defining membership by family units, Jewish communities subtly communicate to adult unmarried children, singles, widows, widowers, and divorcees that they are not valued enough to be counted within Jewish life. They require a different membership category.

In addition, Jewish communities commit an error that no intelligent business would ever make. We disenfranchise our young people at an arbitrary age and require them to “rejoin” Jewish life when they are employed, married and have moved back to the neighborhood. Behavioral economics has called attention to the power of defaults. In their 2008 book Nudge, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein encourage thinking about defaults amidst what they call “choice architecture,” the different ways in which choices can be presented, and the impact of that presentation on decision-making. One of the most commonly cited studies on the power of defaults is the example of organ donation. One study found that donor registration rates were twice as high when potential donors had to opt out versus opt into donor registration. –

Our Jewish communal counting system defaults young people “out” of Jewish life – rather than defaulting them “into” Jewish life. Thaler and Sunstein’s insights would encourage us to stop this. What is the other option? Every person born into a Jewish community should remain a part of that community (unless they formally opt-out).

What questions remain?

Perhaps counting families is not a relic of the past but a useful ongoing tool to create pressure toward a certain family structure. It may be a feature and not a bug. How might Jewish communities continue to normalize the traditional family without disenfranchising those who do not fit its rigid model?

In Western societies, a young person gains voting rights at the age of eighteen. When should a young person gain the right to “vote” within Jewish communal life? Should voting rights be tied to financial participation or to something within Jewish identity?

A synagogue community has a financial side to how it operates. Money (a half-shekel) was integral to how the Torah asks us to count our people. The family-unit as a metric exists because that’s how people have contributed financially to their communities. How can a financial model that counts neshamot become viable?

Counting matters. Counting also involves risks. Exodus 30:12 speaks of the possibility of plague should the count not be performed appropriately. II Samuel 24 describes such an incident. What risks remain even if we prioritize the counting of neshamot over counting families?

Chaim Strauchler, rabbi of Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck, is an Associate Editor of TRADITION.