Vayishlach - 2022

Chevre, this week’s parsha is וַיִּשְׁלַח (Vayishlach). This week we start with the preparations for Yaakov and family to meet Esav. This includes the famous angel wrestling match (or was it a dream?) and finally the brothers meet and leave without hostility, I wouldn’t say they are best friends now. This immediately is followed by the capture Dina, Yaakov’s daughter. The prince of Shechem wants to marry her and the sons of Yaakov explain that the men of Shechem need to be circumcised. When they are recovery, Shimon and Levi go in and kill them all. From this, we see that Shimon and Levi exhibit the wrong kind of Bias for Action, but they also haven’t learned from their father’s mistakes. They used deception to get what they want. Yaakov is angry and we can see that he just finished making amends for his mistakes that took him away from home for 21 years and just now was able to find some sense of calm. 

Following this, the family continues on and Rachel dies on the way to Efrat (hello all the Efratonians out there) which is Bet Lechem (Bethlehem, I can see Efrat and parts of Bet Lechem from my town). One Rabbinic source I read stated that since it’s not allowed to marry 2 sisters, before Yaakov could enter back into Eretz Yisrael (let’s not debate the borders) and so the 2nd one that was married died. She could have also been punished for the lying to Laban around the theft of the idols and Yaakov’s declaration there. For me, this is a metaphor for the idea of being able to seamlessly run multicloud and being able to move workloads between cloud providers. It’s extremely painful to make this work and I haven’t heard of anyone that has gotten it right yet.

Shabbat Shalom.