Chevre, this week’s parsha is כִּי תִּשָּׂא (Ki Tisa). And the parsha starts with how Bnei Yisrael is to take a census. It is generally considered “bad” to count people in Judaism, so instead we count things. At shul (synagogue) when we need to count for a minyan we use a 10 word pasuk or we say not 1, not 2, or we count kippot. Anything to avoid counting people [1]. So in our parsha, everyone gives a Half Shekel and those Half Shekels are counted to figure out how many people there are. Now what is interesting this year is that parsha Shekalim, when we give the Half Shekel, is next week. So we’ll read this section again. In the cloud, this is less of a problem except that it could take time to count all of our resources. So we have things like Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), S3 Inventories, CloudWatch Logs, and many other kinds of lists and logs that we can use automated methods to count. I’m trying to think how long it would take to count 600,000 Half Shekel coins. This was in the day before the banks had money counting machines too. Shabbat Shalom.

[1] https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1635539/jewish/Why-Do-We-Not-Count-Jews.htm