Terumah - 2024

Chevre, this week’s parsha is Terumah (תְּרוּמָה). This week we have the start of the details of the Mishkan or Tabernacle. It was pointed out by my wife’s cousin that Genesis has 30 sentances to describe the creation of the world. Shemot has over 400 to describe the building of the Mishkan.

Some say the Mishkan is a portable Har Sinai (Mount Sinai) and this is how we stay connected with G-d. We don’t know which hill Sinai actually is in the desert, but we do know where the Mishkan had permanent (Mount Moriah) or semi-permanent (Shiloh). The difference in Jewish thought is that Mount Moriah permanently retains it’s holiness, where sites like Shiloh or any of the resting places in the desert do not. The Mishkan is a series of tents or temporary walls that seperate the holy places from the less holy places. They also help folks ensure they don’t accidently move into a holy area when they are not pure.

In “standard” networking this would be like having subnets and needing to pass through routers, or more likely firewalls, between security zones. In the cloud, this could be like having different types of subnets (private vs public), but subnets are also used to distinguish AZs within a VPC. So the cloud picture becomes more foggy. I won’t start getting into the details of the networking intricacies released by AWS over the past 6ish years that take the picture from foggy to murky by adding capabilities and complexity.

What remains true, however, is that since ancient times, it’s been important for folks to seperate “normal” from important or holy. The difference is that in Judaism there is no metadata service or API that can tell you if you’re impure or currently trodding on a holy area. Shabbat Shalom.