VaEtchanan - 2024

Chevre, this week’s parsha is VaEtchanan (ואתחנן). The first thing that caught my eye is where Moshe at the very beginning of the parsha says to HaShem “You have begun to show Your servant Your greatness and Your strong hand…” This is part of Moshe’s plea to be allowed into Eretz Yisrael. As I try to connect this with my cloud experience, I remember back to sitting in a movie theatre at an AWS Awesome Day and learning about some of the things AWS and The Cloud could provide. It was magical. To this day, like yesterday and today, I am still in awe at the simplisty of spinning up something new and combining a few technologies together to make something magical (I was working on an EC2 with Immich running in docker containers with the data source on S3 using mountpoint-s3, I’ll document it on my Github when I have it all working).

There are several places in the parsha where exile and return are mentioned. For The Jewish People, these are important concepts and reflect directly on our presence here in Israel and the restoration of the living language of Hebrew (ok, I’m told I butcher it 🙂 ). In the realm of The Cloud, this is automatic multi-AZ workloads and services, serverless that can run on any AZ. Or even workloads that can now gracefully migrate between regions for those extra-special mission critical workloads using some of the latest AWS services and technologies. When I tried to spin up a pile of Rasperries Pi (RSPs) with big disks to make a GFS cluster and then needed to restore, it was a nightmare (we are talking RSP 1 Model B+, so very old). AWS does this under the covers automatically with no or little impact to the operations and performance of the services. It boggles the mind.

Then the parsha gets into the 10 Commandments and The Shema. In the early days of The Jewish People these were the new concepts in the world. These were the things that made the Jews different from many of the other peoples around them. And today, these still differentiate Jewish Values from some others. It is this focus on ethics, what is right and in the Shema, teaching children that has lead to many of the successes of The Jewish People throughout the ages. And with that, I’m proud of our heritage and our accomplishments. Shabbat Shalom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aii3fDdZnrM&

https://youtu.be/aii3fDdZnrM

And my website with archives: https://www.clouded-torah.org/