Chevre, this week’s parsha is Pinchas (פנחס). We pick up where we left off last week, right after Pinchas killed some offenders in front of the Mishkan. Pinchas, the grandson of Aaron, is made a Cohen (priest) along with all his offspring. A new census is taken. The land is shown to Moshe and then we have a brief reiteration of the offerings daily, Shabbat, Rosh Chodesh and for each holiday. These are the passages that we read on each holiday and these are the passages we recite as part of the Mussaf prayer for Shabbat, Rosh Chodesh and each holiday.

I’ve had 2 humbling experiences this week that I want to talk about briefly. The first, this morning, I completed learning the Talmud Bavli for the first time. I have been learning 6 pages (1 side, an amud) per week for 15+ years using an MP3 shiur. Today, I completed the last one. On Sunday, B”H, I’ll start in on the Yerushalmi with another series of MP3 shiurim suggested by a friend.

The other, occured as an accident. And I think this connects with the personality of Pinchas. I was playing with some GenAI in relation to my AWS account, trying to see what it could do. Later in the week, I received a Cost Anomaly Detection (CAD) alert that my costs for CloudTrail and GuardDuty were up. Normally, I spend $0.09 per day on these services, but the other day they were around $3. I used GenAI again to try to understand what was causing the costs. Today, I received another CAD alert that my costs were UP much much more. Through some additional investigations, it appears that my research into the costs generated 28M S3 get object requests via Athena. And today, after having done even more research, I’m a bit worried about what the additional costs from today will look like. Sigh, I’ve learned a valuable lesson. It’s good to be zealous for the right things, but you need to be careful with the technology and capabilities that you have.

Shabbat Shalom