Chevre, this week’s parsha is שֹׁפְטִים (Shoftim). We are marching toward the end of the Moshe’s speach and his repetition of many things we have seen before. “When you come to the Land that HaShem, your G-d, gives you, you shall not learn to act according to the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you one who causes his son or daughter to pass through the fire, one who practices divinations, an astrologer, one who reads omens, a sorcerer, or an animal charmer, one who inquires of Ov or Yidoni, or one who consults the dead.” Passing through the fire was done in Jerusalem outside the current old city in a wadi called Gehinom, were we get the Hebrew word for hell. It’s not clear if the practice was to pass a child actually through a flame, to burn them as a sacrifice or if there was some kind of a ring of fire that they were passed through. In any case, these are things that are not to be done. Translating to AWS, we shall not leave our customers to make the same mistakes as others have made, we shall give them whitepapers, re:Invent sessions/videos, and support cases to teach how things can and maybe should work and to offer best practices. While looking at logs is ok, once an instance is terminated, it’s gone. Once things are deleted, if you don’t have backups, we don’t keep them (consulting with the dead). While Lambda may seem like sorcery, it has become the backbone of many workloads at the great reduction as seen on the bill. While we have the Aerospace and Satellite Solutions group along with Ground Station, we do not read the stars to tell the future. We even have AWS Braket for quantum computing, but it’s all science and not trying to change nature (reading omens). And we have #dogsofaws, but we can’t (I wish) really charm them. We support our customer’s needs sometimes even before they know they have them, but we are not telling the future. We also accept being misunderstood for a long time. These are the ways of Amazon and AWS, go and learn them (Hillel HaZaken, “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, go and learn it”). Shabbat Shalom