Chevre, this week’s parsha is Ki Tetze (כִּֽי־תֵצֵ֥א). Since we are in Elul, we are turning our thoughts toward “The Chagim” or the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. In Israel, there is a phrase “After The Chagim” which is referring to “I’ll do this later.” One of the members of my synagogue at the very end of Simchat Torah / Shemini Atzeret (they are together in Israel) states out loud “Now it is After The Chagim” and everyone chuckles.
This year, the way the different calendars come together, “After The Chagim” will be the run up to AWS re:Invent. And for the past several years, there is a long list of announcements that come out before the conference. The RSS feeds are full and there are lots of things to keep up on. I’m happy I won’t be trying to digest many of these while sitting in my succah this year.
The parsha this week reminds me of these pre-conference announcements. We already know that Sefer Devarim is mostly a long speach by Moshe to the Bnei Yisrael. And many of the things are repeats from before. But the long list of things that appear in the parshiot sometimes seem thrown together.
We have what to do if you go out to war and fall in love with a captive. The rights of the first born. The rebellious son. Hanging and Burial. Concern for the property of another. Sending the mother bird from the nest (before taking the eggs). Building a protective fence. Tzittzit (the strings on the 4 corners of a garment). Defamation of a married woman. Forbidden and restricted marriages. Sanctity of the camp. Interest on loans. A worker’s right to eat. Divorce and remarriage. Kidnapping. Timely payment of workers. Gifts to the poor from the harvest. Penalty for embarrassing another. Honest weights and measures.
This long list are important for society. Without these society would break down. In the cloud, these would be security measures to enable or disable network access, logins and access to cloud resources, the ability to see your bill or what you’re being charged for, storage options, and more. All the basic needs for computing. Whereas the parsha is going over many of the basic needs of a society. This is the society that was defined and built several thousand years ago. And we are still working within this framework to be a holy people and to be good to each other.
Shabbat Shalom.
On a personal note, I was on a podcast that was posted this week: