Chevra, this week’s parsha is וַיֵּצֵּא (Vayetze). We have the story of Jacob running away from his brother Esav, sleeping in Bet El, the dream of the Ladder, his working for 7 years for Rachel, but marrying Leah instead and then marrying Rachel and working another 7 years and he makes the way with 12 of his 13 named children (11 boys and Dina) most of the way to Eretz Yisrael. For those of you returning from reInvent, you can feel comforted that he doesn’t get home this week either. There is a Rabbinic idea of 2 Jerusalems. There is the lower Jerusalem which is the one on this world and it’s a work in progress And there is the upper Jerusalem which is whole and perfect. This reminded me this week of AWS IoT where we have the actual device out in the field (sometimes literally) and it may have connectivity problems sometimes. And there is the Shadow Device which is a cloud based representation and it handles all the updates that the IoT device needs to receive when it reconnects. If we take these 2 “devices” of the lower and upper Jerusalem, how are they connected? I say that Yakov’s Ladder was the connection between the upper and lower Jerusalem and what he called angels are actually the MQTT packets of data being passed between them. In this way, the lower Jerusalem is progressing to get closer to the perfect and whole upper Jerusalem and part of that process is via our prayers and good deeds. May everyone return home safely after the conference. Shabbat Shalom.
Vayetze - 2019