One Billion and Counting

This week, a Jewish woman in New York made one of the single largest charitable gifts ever: Ruth Gottesman donated one billion dollars to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to provide free tuition to all its students in perpetuity.
Upon reading this news, I felt a sense of pride seeing the Jewish value of tzedakah being done in such a remarkable manner. It also made me think about the instruction G-d gave Moses in this week's Torah portion, where he was tasked with taking a census of the Jewish people.
The reason why countries or locales conduct censuses is to assess the strength of their population for military or tax purposes. A larger census typically signifies greater power. Yet, counting the Jews poses a challenge; because our numbers are consistently small it could portray us as vulnerable. 
In fact, there is an interesting Jewish tradition that we refrain from directly counting Jews by number because of fear of the evil eye. Instead, when necessary, we count through the words of a verse. For example, when counting ten men for a minyan, we recite a verse with ten words like "hoshiah, es, amecha, etc.," rather than counting "one, two, three," and so forth.
This brings us to the specific details of G-d's instruction in this week's Torah portion: Moses was told to count the people indirectly, by asking each person to contribute a coin, which would then be counted.
As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks eloquently put it, while we may be small in number, our contribution is very big. Indeed, there have been no people who have contributed as much to the world as the Jewish people, whether in ethics, medicine, economics, sciences, arts, or, most importantly, in matters of G-dliness and spirituality.
It's important to remember each morning as we awaken that this is also a fundamental aspect of Judaism: thanking G-d for giving us another day and recognizing that each of us has a significant contribution to make in improving the world. And we need not wait until we can write a billion-dollar check to do so.