Chevre, this week’s parsha is Chaya Sarah (חיי שרה). There is an interesting passage toward the end of our parsha. Avraham remarries a woman who is named Keturah. The meforshim (the commentators on the Torah) disagree if he remarried Hagar or if this is a different woman. The Torah then goes on to mention the children that this woman bore to Avraham. He then does and is burried in Hevron by Ishmael and Yitchak.

First of all, I was so fascinated by this small section when I was reading it this week, that I ended up researching this pasuk (this line of the Torah) in several of my Chumashim to see what the commentators had to say.

If this was Hagar, did he ever divorce her? My son commented last week that Avraham fed his guests milk and meat together. The classic answers are that 1/ he didn’t have to follow the rules that weren’t given yet. Except there is an idea from the Midrash that the Avot (the forefathers) followed all the laws of the Torah. The 2/ next answer is that he gave them the milk first and only afterwards the meat. So that would halachically be OK. These answers did not satisfy my son. We’re still looking for some answers.

So here, if Hagar is Keturah, then it could be that Avraham divorced her (he definitely sent her away) and then remarried her. Or, if this is a different woman, then that wouldn’t be a problem. I don’t think we’re going to resolve this issue here.

Since we weren’t there or there is nothing recorded, we won’t know. In the past couple of weeks, in my home lab, I’ve been expanding some of my observability. I have been using Beszel for a while. I can’t tell if the newer versions of Beszel have additional features or I never knew about all the features. Either way, I’m super excited about what it can show me and what it records. And in the past couple of weeks, I’ve also implemented Uptime-Kuma (Kuma). So Beszel has a agent on the machines and can show disk, cpu, memory, processes and even can drill down into dockers and docker logs (I just learned this). And the Beszel agents upgrade themselves daily. This was all well and good until I found that a machine was running fine, but a critical (to me) process was not. So then I started implementing Kuma, which can make HTTP(S) calls to a port or interface, report on up or down changes and also records the round trip time in a graph. So now I can monitor specific critical services/ports on my various machines and see them. These have become pretty handy when dealing with “interesting” problems accessing some of my personal systems.

The point here is that the Torah is not telling us the details of Keturah, the sages try to fill some of that in. We will never know the answer, just like we’ll never know if interfaces are up or down when there is no monitor running. So we are left to think about the situation and the questions, but we can’t answer them. Sometimes, the question is better than the answer.

Shabbat Shalom.