With the founding of a modern Jewish state in Israel in 1948, a fair share of halachic dilemmas arose. One of them can be traced to this week’s parashah and haftarah.

In the parashah, Moses is commanded to count the Israelite males between the ages of 20 and 60. Rashi explains that this count was not a direct count of heads, rather each person presented a coin, with the total sum of coins indicating the total amount of Israelites.

The Talmud deduces from the aforementioned verse of our haftarah — “which shall neither be measured nor counted” — a prohibition against counting the populace (Yoma 22b). This prohibition is codified in the halachic works (Rambam and others).

The rationale commonly offered for this is to protect from the evil eye; to count people is to set a finite amount to their number which limits their potential and ability to grow. In the words of the rabbis: “blessing rests only on what is concealed from the eye” (Ta’anit 8b).

Conducting a census of a population is crucial for demographic, economic and resource planning. How would modern Israel count a nation that doesn’t want to be counted?

The first to deal with this question was Sephardic Chief Rabbi, Benzion Uziel (1880-1953). He pointed to the indirect nature of written surveys in contrast to direct head counting, and thus argued that a modern census was not included in the prohibition against counting.

In 1951, the intriguing rabbi, Yaakov Yehiel Weinberg, also permitted taking part in the upcoming census, arguing that this was essential for security planning and thus was not proscribed.

Over the years, further arguments were put forward to allow participation in the census: firstly, any large-scale census is inevitably inexact and the prohibition is to take an exact counting; secondly, the Israeli census does not cover the entire Jewish people and the prohibition is when the entire nation is counted; and thirdly, the inclusion of non-Jewish citizens in the census obviates the issue, since it will not be a counting of Jewish souls solely.

Despite all these arguments, there were and still are authoritative halachists who consider the census a prohibition even in its modern form and urge their followers from refraining in participating.