Chevre, this week’s parsha is אֱמֹר (Emor). Today, Friday, is also Pesach Sheni or the day that the Bnei Yisrael requested because they could not bring the Pesach offering during it’s time because they were tame or ritually impure. 

I told my son this morning Chag Sameach (happy holiday) and he said, but that was yesterday. Yesterday was May the 4th or Star Wars day. I smiled and told him that is true and today is Revenge of the 5th (or Sith day), but it’s also Pesach Sheni. He smiled and turned back to whatever I had interrupted. Ah teenagers. ;-)

The central part of our parsha talks about the holidays and the sacrificial offerings that are made on those holidays. We read these sections of the Torah on the holidays and they also make up a central part of the holiday’s mussaf prayer. Today and for the past 2000 years, we have not had a Temple in Jerusalem to bring sacrifices and so the sages adapted sacrifices to prayer and one who prayers at the right time on the right day is considered as if they have brought the sacrifices. I expect my vegetarian neices like this much better. From a technilogical perspective, this is having a representation of something else in it’s place. While I don’t use AWS IOT services, they include such a “mental model” of a real-world object or device. Any updates are made to the IOT cloud object and when the device or object is online and syncs, the updates are sent to it. So there is no real-world sacrifice, but we are updating the “cloud” with our prayers and devotions for the betterment of our selves, our families, our communities and for everyone. Shabbat Shalom