Chevre, this week’s parsha is Emor (אמור). There are 2 sections in this week’s parsha that stood out to me today. There is a section on blemishes in the priest that is bringing the sacrifice to the temple. So the person that brings a sacrifice gives it to the priest and the priest (or a group of priests) do what is required with the sacrifice. And there is a section that talks about blemishes in the sacrifice itself. When dealing with anything pertaining to The Temple, things need to be holy and complete. Anything with a blemish or a person bringing the sacrifice are not complete in the eyes of Jewish Law (Halacha). Therefore, these are exempt from bringing brought or from the service. If and when the priest heals up and the blemish goes away, if it can go away, they may return to the service.

My take away from this, today, is there is no such thing as an MVP (Most Viable Product) when it comes to The Temple. A blemish, in the tech world, this would be a bug in a program or a fault in hardware, is impossible. Werner Vogels says “Everything fails all the time”. This could be programs or hardware. And, now over the past few years, we rely on automations and the cloud to overcome many or most of those failures. Anyone who has received an email from my personal address knows that I have a tongue-in-cheek snippet of code in my footer. It’s 7 lines of Bash.

# According to WikiPedia, the Kinneret can hold 
# 4 km^3, so FULL here is in cubit meters
FULL="4000"
while [ "$LEVEL" -lt "$FULL" ]; do
  cat /sea/med /sea/red |\
  grep -vi "salt" |\
  tee /sea/dead /lake/kinneret
  LEVEL=`du -c /sea/dead /lake/kinneret | grep total | awk '{print $1}'`
done

I wrote this many years ago and these days, there is less of a water crisis in Israel because of desalination. I once wrote a full page email with all the bugs I found in this little snippet of code. Writing perfect code is extremely hard, just ask any GenAI. It is our jobs to work towards that perfection and fix our code, identify blemishes in ourselves and work toward fixing those. So that we can be holy to HaShem, to our families and friends, and to ourselves.

Shabbat Shalom