This past week, the lottery reached the third-highest amount in history, more than 1.3-billion-dollars in jackpot. Winning that amount of money in one lump sum, or even in installments, is a huge amount of money. True, it is not an infinite amount of money, but in one’s mind, it is close.
This makes us wonder: G-d promised the Jews many times that we will number as many as the grains of sand on the seashores, or the stars in the sky … a blessing that refers to an infinite growth of the Jewish people. These blessings were given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who at the time were just a few families, but receiving these blessings from G-d meant that the Jews will grow many times over.
Yet, in this week’s Torah portion, Devarim, Moses blessed the Jewish people so that they would grow a thousand times in number. The Jews assumed that Moses was extending G-d’s blessing to them and were frustrated as it sounded like a limitation rather than an expansion. G-d blessed them so that they would be as numerous as the sands on the seashore and now they are only going to be a thousand times their size? To them this seemed like a reduction to the blessing—only a thousand times in size—not an enlargement to the blessing, many thousand times.
Let’s take a closer look at G-d’s and Moses’s blessings. If you really want to get technical, you could figure out how many people could fit on the seashores of the world. You could calculate how many miles of beach there is, and how much space each person needs to stand, and you could come up with a number—a very large number. And when it comes to the stars, the number will be even larger. Astronomers put the overall number in the vicinity of 200 sextillion stars. A very large number, but a number, nevertheless.
On the other hand, Moses looked at the Jewish nation of about two million Jews, and blessed them to be a thousand-fold, i.e., that they should grow to be a nation of two billion people. Although this is an astronomical number, the Jews felt that this was a limitation to their growth. How can one compare two billion to two hundred sextillion?
Moses, the ever-practical leader, answers the Jews in a two-fold answer. A- He is not G-d, he is just like them, a human being, and when a human internalizes a blessing from G-d, they have to bring it down to the human level and make it relevant to their lives, and then B- figure out a way to lift the blessing up to a higher level, to the original intent of what G-d had in mind.
Moses was, and is, our teacher and guide. He represented the quintessential level of “understating” (bina). However, as it is explained in Kabbalah, higher than that is the level of “wisdom” (chachma). Moses is teaching us to not just look at the number of Jews, at our quantity, but to look at our quality.
G-d’s blessing to the Jewish people—that we should be like the stars and the sand—is about more than just numbers. It is about contributing to society. It is about making an impact in the world around us.
Every single day when we wake up in the morning, we should remind ourselves that true, we may be small in numbers, but we are not small in our impact. What am I doing today to make my mark?