The prophet Hosea was instructed to buy back his unfaithful wife for a price that seemed arbitrary — fifteen pieces of silver, and an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley (Hosea 3:2). The sages of the Talmud (Chullin 92a) refused to take the price as mere transaction. They read it as arithmetic of mercy.
"Fifteen," they said, points to the fifteenth of Nisan, when Israel was redeemed from Egypt. "Silver" refers to the righteous. And "an homer and a half-homer" — these equal forty-five measures. So: there are forty-five righteous men, and for their sake alone, the world is preserved.
Then the sages began to argue about where these forty-five live.
Some said thirty of them are in Babylon and fifteen in the Land of Israel. Others reversed it, citing Zechariah 11:13 — I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the Lord — to argue that thirty belong to the holy land and fifteen to the diaspora. Abaye added a sly detail: the greater number of them can be found sitting quietly beneath the gable-ends of synagogues, unnoticed by the worshipers who pass them every Shabbat.
Rav Yehudah pushed the count wider. Thirty righteous men, he said, are found at any moment among the nations of the world, for whose sake those nations, too, are preserved.
The world, the rabbis insisted, is not held up by majorities. It is held up by a handful of the decent, often anonymous, often sitting where no one thinks to look.