{"id":11681,"date":"2025-12-13T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-13T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/?p=11681"},"modified":"2025-12-13T15:28:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T20:28:00","slug":"the-holiness-of-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/the-holiness-of-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Holiness of Numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I used to think numbers in Judaism were kind of random. Noah was on the ark for 40 days and 40 nights. The Jews wandered in the desert for 40 years. I thought \u201cThere\u2019s no way there were actuaries counting out 40 days.\u201d But then it got worse. I learned that “40” in biblical Hebrew doesn’t really mean forty. It means “a lot.” It’s basically the ancient equivalent of “umpteen.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This made me feel like religion wasn’t scientific at all. The whole thing felt parochial and naive. Clearly, the ancient Jews didn’t understand numbers as well as we did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But recently I’ve had a change of heart. It’s not always about mastering mathematics and bending numbers to our whims. It’s about taking the profane (which is a more colorful word for ordinary) and making it holy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Numbers Were Holy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We live in a world where we’ve domesticated numbers. We’ve made them perfectly obedient servants in our spreadsheets, tax forms, and grade point averages. We teach children to manipulate them in school. We’ve built machines that can crunch millions of them per second. Numbers, in our world, are tools\u2014precise, mechanical objects to do our bidding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But go back into Jewish tradition, and numbers were something else entirely. They weren’t just for counting goats or measuring grain. They carried weight. They had meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take the number 18 in Judaism. The Hebrew word for “life”\u2014chai<\/em>\u2014is spelled with the letters chet and yud, which together equal 18 in gematria (Jewish numerology). So 18 became a number infused with the essence of life itself. People give monetary gifts in multiples of 18. They gave a meaning to numbers beyond an amount.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or consider the structure of Torah reading. Seven aliyot (people called up to read) on Shabbat. Seven\u2014not because someone once decided it was a nice round number, but because seven is woven into the fabric of Jewish time. Seven days of creation. Seven days of the week. The seventh day, Shabbat, the most holy. Weekdays have 3 aliyot and holidays are somewhere in between, depending on the importance of the holiday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there’s the counting of the Omer\u201450 days between Passover and Shavuot, marking the journey from physical to spiritual freedom. Eight nights of Hanukkah. These aren’t random. They’re part of a sacred mathematics, a calendar built on the conviction that certain numbers resonate with divine patterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To modern ears, this all sounds a bit naive. We know<\/em> numbers. We’ve mastered them. What could be sacred about seven or eighteen or fifty?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Miracle Hiding in Plain Math<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It’s easy to say that we should be thinking about bigger things\u2014matters that are more meaningful. We should be appreciating great art and music, because that’s the ultimate expression of being human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But we can appreciate the beauty of mathematics as a holy thing too. Think about it. You have three goats over here. Three fish over there. Somehow, your brain can extract this abstract concept\u2014”three-ness”\u2014that applies to both. You can hold it in your mind, manipulate it, combine it with other numbers, understand that three plus three equals six whether we’re talking about goats or fish or stars or centuries. That’s crazy. It\u2019s about as powerful a human capability as we have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’re just meat computers, basically\u2014neurons firing in particular patterns\u2014and yet somehow we can comprehend infinity. We can grasp limits and derivatives. We can calculate the trajectory needed to land a probe on Mars. No other animal does this. Not even close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Math isn’t just a tool we invented. It\u2019s a capability central to human thought and understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even Isaac Newton, one of history’s greatest scientists, saw numbers this way. We all know that there are 7 colors in the rainbow: ROYGBIV. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. But what\u2019s the deal with indigo? Look carefully at the actual spectrum and you’ll notice indigo doesn’t really hold its own as a distinct color. Newton included it to get to the number seven\u2014that sacred number.If God created the rainbow, there had to be seven colors, not six.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reclaiming Wonder<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

So what do we do with this? I’m not suggesting we all start practicing gematria or refuse to use the number four because it sounds like “death” in Mandarin. But maybe there’s something worth recovering here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his book To Life!<\/em><\/a> Rabbi Harold Kushner writes: “Everything in God’s world can be holy if you realize its potential holiness. Everything we do can be transformed into a Sinai experience, an encounter with the sacred. The goal of Judaism is not to teach us how to escape from the profane world to the cleansing presence of God, but to teach us how to bring God into the world, how to take the ordinary and make it holy.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now when I look at the numbers of aliyot on Shabbat or weekdays, or the ten people needed for a minyan, I pause and remember that there’s something powerful and primal and wonderfully human in numbers. The ancient reverence for numbers wasn’t primitive\u2014it was holy. It recognized that our ability to abstract and pattern-match is one of the deepest things that makes us human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It reminds me that the goal of life isn’t to control everything. It\u2019s not to turn everything into a number. It’s to recognize that everything in life can be holy or magical\u2014even numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I used to think numbers in Judaism were kind of random. Noah was on the ark for 40 days and 40 nights. The Jews wandered in the desert for 40 years. I thought \u201cThere\u2019s no way there were actuaries counting out 40 days.\u201d But then it got worse. I learned that “40” in biblical Hebrew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8wCkz-32p","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2702,"url":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/a-biography-of-numbers\/","url_meta":{"origin":11681,"position":0},"title":"A Biography of Numbers","author":"Robert Schlaff","date":"March 28, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"In the past few years, I've seen books written about lots of different things like elements, molecules, and colors. I'm surprised that no one has written a biography of numbers. Math nerds like me would love this book. I'm thinking it would look like Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Science and Math"","block_context":{"text":"Science and Math","link":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/category\/science-math\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/172-1725002_jackie-robinsons-retired-number-ftd-florist-300x277.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7695,"url":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/our-visit-to-israel\/","url_meta":{"origin":11681,"position":1},"title":"Our Visit to Israel","author":"Robert Schlaff","date":"December 18, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"We went to Israel in Passover of 2023. I wrote up my notes as we travelled but didn't get to publish this until the atrocities of October 7th. 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These four Jewish brothers, who immigrated from Poland in the late 1880s, were a case study of Jewish success early in the movie business. 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