Lifting heads. The word Nassau that gives its name to this week's Parachar is a verb of an extraordinary range of meanings among them to lift, to carry, to forgive.

Here though, and elsewhere in the wilderness years, it's used in conjunction with the phrase,

et rosh, the head, to mean to count.

Now this is an odd way of speaking because biblical Hebrew is not short of

other verbs meaning to count among them Limnot, Lispo, Lifkod and Lakshov. Why then not use one of

these verbs? Why not simply say count instead of lift the head? The answer takes us into one of the

most revolutionary of all Jewish beliefs.

If we're each in the image of God, then every one of us has infinite value.

We are each unique.

Even genetically identical twins share only approximately 50% of their attributes.

None of us is substitutable for any other.

This may well be the single most important consequence of monotheism.

Discovering God, singular and alone, our ancestors discovered the human individual single and alone.

This was simply not of value in the ancient world, nor is it one in tyrannical or totalitarian

societies today.

The ruler might be deemed to have infinite value, so might some of the members of his or

her court, but certainly not the masses, as the word mass itself implies.

Most people were simply regarded as part of a mass, an army, a workforce, a gang of slaves.

What mattered was their total number, not their individual lives, their hopes and fears, their loves and dreams.

That's the image we have of Egypt of the pharaohs.

It's how the sages understood the builders of Babel. They said that if a brick

fell from the tower, they wept, but if a worker fell and died, they paid no attention. Almost

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