3 min read
As a general rule, my column here is meant to focus on statistics, and how important it is to measure them accurately and interpret them correctly. This one was going to be about Donald Trump and some of the statistics around the US election. But as I was in Florida preparing to write it, my world was shaken up by events much closer to home. So, in the hope you'll forgive this one indulgence, I decided to write about my grandmother instead.
You see, my grandmother died last week. There's nothing particularly unusual about that, I guess. People's grandmothers die all the time. But there is something at least slightly anomalous about my grandma. She was 101. She was born in January 1915, during the First World War. At that time, she would have been expected to live for about 53 years - the idea that she would come close to doubling that would have been completely unthinkable.
But her numbers were extraordinary in many ways. She was the youngest of four children, and the only girl. Not that you would have known it - she was a tomboy as a child, always giving as good as she got. When they were dating, my late grandfather challenged her to a game of table-tennis, only to end up getting humiliatingly thrashed. Unwilling to accept defeat at the hands of a girl, he challenged her to rematch after rematch, determined to finally win. He did beat her in the end, although she probably let him, just to save his bruised ego. Sometimes love matters more than the scores you get.
Her sedarim were legendary. They are etched in the memories of the 30 or 40 people who attended them each year, not least due to the extremely loud and utterly tuneless rendition of Chad Gadya belted out annually by all the male members of her generation. They blamed the four cups of wine, but I did the maths. It was a lot more than that. I learned there and then to always check people's reported figures.
Community was central to her life. Some of her numbers are impossible to reconstruct. I don't know how many meals on wheels she delivered to the elderly in Stamford Hill over the years, but it was almost certainly in the tens of thousands. I also have no idea how much money she raised while teaching numerous people to play bridge at the local WIZO bridge club she ran, but I'd be surprised if it didn't run to six figures at least.
Thank you to the unsung members of our community
Over the course of her 101 years, she had three children, fourteen grandchildren, and, at the latest count, 25 great-grandchildren. If you include the spouses who joined the family at various stages, she had sixty descendants at the time of her passing. Impressive counts, by any standard.
As she aged, we often wondered if she would make it to 100. We watched her outlive her parents, her brothers, her sisters-in-law, her husband, indeed, her entire generation. But even after she reached that milestone, she kept going for over a year, living in the end to 101.
The number 101 crops up occasionally in our statistical work. Typically, the counts add up to 100, but every-so-often, when we round up or down the figures to the nearest whole number, a slight anomaly appears. The numbers sum to 101. And we discuss whether to publish the more precise figures with their decimal points, or the rounded figures, for simplicity's sake, alongside a note explaining the computational anomaly.
I will think about my grandmother the next time this happens. Because sometimes, the numbers don't quite make sense. When you do the maths, they add up to more than they should. And that was my grandmother. Whichever of her numbers I look at, they all seem to be greater than they should be.
Maybe, on reflection, this column does have a Donald Trump link after all. He talks numbers all the time - bragging about how much he is worth, crying conspiracy when the figures count against him.
But I learned from my grandmother, Bessie Samson, that the most important numbers are the ones we achieve through our deeds, through going above and beyond, through making our contributions add up to more than anyone would ever have expected. To her, and all the other unsung members of our community whose numbers also exceed all expectations, thank you. Donald Trump may have billions, but you are the ones who really count.
Jonathan Boyd is executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research
