Parashat Vaetchanan: The Fewest of All Peoples
July 25
There’s a verse in this week’s parasha that seems to make no sense in the context of the Torah. Moses tells the people, quite plainly, that God did not set His affection on them because they were numerous. In fact, Moses says the opposite: “for you are the fewest of all peoples.”
So what’s wrong with that?
I’ll tell you! Remember that God promised Abraham that his children would be like the stars of the sky and the sand on the shore — too many to number, too many to count on a clear night, too many to count on a beach. And in the book of Exodus, we’re told the Israelites multiplied so quickly, so successfully, that a frightened Pharaoh looked out at them and panicked. He enslaved an entire people precisely because there were too many of them. That’s not a portrait of the fewest of all peoples. That’s a portrait of a demographic emergency.
So which is it? Are we as countless as the stars, or are we the smallest of all nations? For a moment, it feels like the Torah is arguing with itself.
Commentators have wrestled with this contradiction for centuries, and their answers are worth knowing. Some say it’s a matter of timing — we were few when we were first chosen, back in Abraham’s day, and only grew numerous later, so both verses are true, just at different points on the timeline. Others say it’s a matter of relativity — small compared to the empires of Egypt and Canaan, even if large in absolute terms, the way a city of a hundred thousand people feels small standing next to a nation of tens of millions. And Rashi reads it almost as an act of divine restraint, almost tender in its logic: God loved us even though loving the very few is a harder, more deliberate kind of love than loving the crowd everyone already wants to be near. Anyone can love what’s popular. It takes something else to commit yourself to what’s overlooked.
All of those readings are worth sitting with. But the resolution I find most compelling comes from Targum Yonatan — known in more scholarly circles as Targum Pseudo-Yonatan, likely written centuries after the name it’s attached to, though we don’t know exactly when. His approach is simple, and it reframes the whole verse. This was never a statement about arithmetic. It’s a statement about self-image. God isn’t comparing head counts. God is describing a posture — a people who came into being in humility, and who are being commanded to hold onto that posture no matter how many they become, no matter how much they accomplish. Largeness of impact was never supposed to translate into largeness of ego.
That distinction — between how many we are and how we see ourselves — turns out to be the story of Jewish history.
By any honest accounting, we are a small people. We have never been more than a rounding error in the world’s population. And yet our footprint on human civilization — ethics, law, medicine, science, literature, the very idea that history bends toward moral meaning — is wildly out of proportion to our numbers. No serious person judges a nation by its size. They judge it by what it leaves behind. A tiny people has left behind an outsized inheritance, and it did not do that by thinking of itself as small. It did it by understanding, quietly and consistently, that being few was never a disqualification. It was the precondition. A message meant for the whole world doesn’t need a majority to carry it. It needs a people willing to keep carrying it when almost no one else will.
And by every rational measure, our people should not have survived. The Crusades tried to end us, marching armies through Jewish communities on the way to a holy war that treated us as collateral damage. Forced conversions — from Spain to Portugal to Russia — tried to erase us by making disappearance the price of safety. Genocidal regimes, in living memory, not ancient history, living memory, tried to annihilate us entirely, with an efficiency and an industrial will that should have succeeded. Each time, by every historical calculation, this should have been the end of the story.
And here’s the part worth pausing on: empires that were larger, wealthier, and far more powerful than we ever were have vanished completely from the earth. The Assyrians are gone. The Babylonians are gone. Rome, which exiled us, is gone. And we are still here, reading this same Torah portion this week that Jews read the week Rome fell. Every time we were nearly erased, we returned. We rebuilt Jerusalem. We built a state that lay dormant for two thousand years and then stood back up. We kept arguing over Talmud in study halls rebuilt from rubble. They herded us into ghettos and within those walls, we created commentaries and Torah that we still study to this day. We kept Shabbat and holidays in places that had tried to make sure there would be no one left to light the candles.
That pattern doesn’t have a natural explanation. It has a spiritual one.
We see it today, on both sides of the ocean. Here in America and in Israel, Jews face hostility from directions that would once have seemed politically incompatible — hatred from the right and hatred from the left, meeting from opposite ends of the spectrum to arrive, somehow, at the exact same target. And still, we are not merely surviving that pressure. We are building. Teaching. Praying. Raising families who identify proudly as Jews, sending our children to Jewish schools and summer camps and universities where standing up as a Jew now takes real courage. And here is an interesting factoid: after October 7 and Jews were attacked and persecuted for being Jewish, a very substantial number of totally secular Jews identified publicy and strongly with both their Jewish heritage and with Israel. In a strange way, October 7 created stronger and more knowledgeable Jews. A truly unintended consequence of anti-Semitism. The lesson here is simple: we thrive not because we ignore the danger, but while looking directly at it.
Why? I believe the answer is exactly what Targum Yonatan pointed to: humility. Not smallness of ambition, but smallness of ego relative to something larger than ourselves. Maybe knowledge that we belong to a truly ancient people. Maybe knowing that we all have a shared destiny. Maybe being aware that we all stood at Sinai together.
A people who believed they wer
e the ultimate source of their own strength would have burned out centuries ago — every empire that believed that eventually did, and did so far faster than we have. But a people who understand themselves as vessels for something beyond themselves has an entirely different kind of endurance, because the strength they’re drawing on was never finite to begin with. We were never the point. We were chosen, Moses tells us, not because of our greatness but despite our smallness — to carry a message that was never really about us.
That’s the humility Vaetchanan asks us to hold onto. Not to shrink from what we’ve contributed. Not to hide from what we’re facing. But to remember where the strength to face it actually comes from.
We are the fewest of all peoples. We are also the people who gave the world the idea that a single God cares how human beings treat one another. Those two facts, sitting side by side, are not a contradiction. They are the whole point.
Am Yisrael Chai — not because we are many, but because we were never trying to be the biggest story in the room. We were trying to tell a bigger one. Shabbat Shalom.
