Hoshanah Rabba, Shemini Atzeret + Simchat Torah - 2022

Chevre, today is הושענא רבה (Hoshanah Rabbah) and Tonight/Tomorrow is שְׁמִינִי עֲצֶרֶת + שמחת תורה (Shemini Atzeret + Simchat Torah). Hoshanah Rabbat is the end of Sukkot and also includes some of the Selichot type prayers from Rosh Hashanah / Yom Kippur. This is kinda the last last chance to get these in. Kinda like the “are you sure you want to delete this? Are you really sure? Super sure? OK, I’m going to delete it …”. Or in AWS, are you really sure you want this S3 bucket to public? Super sure? …

Shemini Atzeret is a completely different holiday. This is like HaShem telling Am Yisrael, I want you to stick around a little longer. Like an Encore at a concert, a 2nd desert at dinner or getting an extension to one of the few services that AWS turns off (most recently was EC2 Classic) or a delay in a forced upgrade of RDS. The payers are slightly different for Shemini Atzeret, for example, there is a psalm we’ve been saying several times a day since the start of the month of Elul (psalm 27 לדוד ה׳ אורי…), this is not said on Shemini Atzeret. And we don’t sit in the Succah nor pick up our 4 species. 

In addition to Shemini Atzeret is Simchat Torah. (outside of Israel, these are seperate days since the order of reading the Torah was established in exile). Simchat Torah is the celebration of the completing and restarting of the reading of the Torah. In my experience Simchat Torah has really taken over the day. We dance with the Torah, sing songs and do actually complete and restart reading the Torah. This is the only day of the year that we read from the Torah at night. In the cloud this would seem like the joy when someone completes migrating to the cloud, empties their data center and dances for joy in the now unoccupied space before it’s reclaimed and repurposed for something else. I wish I had an honorary rack nut on the wall to remember all the cuts and gouges I’ve received over the years.

May your final holiday be cut and gouge free, may you be filled with Joy for this special day and for the whole year. Chag Sameach.