Chevre, there is no parsha this week. But it is Shabbat Chol HaMoed Sukkot, we will read from the Torah and from Nevi’im. And we will read Megillat Kohelet.

I’ve been reading Zot HaBracha this week in preparation for Simchat Torah, mid next week. It is the final readings of the Torah and covers brachot to all the tribes and the final words of Moshe.

Sukkot is called Zman Simchatenu. Our Happy Time. I know with the things in the news recently that there are a lot of super happy people. I truly pray that all the hostages are returned soon.

During Chol HaMoed, it is traditional to get out of the house (and out of the Succah) and explore the country. We went the first day of Chol HaMoed on a walking tour that started at Jerusalem’s New Gate. It was European history focused, which meant I didn’t even know where the New Gate was and there was a lot of new things for me. And, of course, we played Jewish Geography and found someone who had made Aliyah a few years ago from our families’ community in CT.

On the Second day we went through a Leket program to a farmer in the Gaza Envelope and (for the 2nd year) packed Aravot for Hoshanah Rabah. It was nice to spend time with the neighbors and to help out the farmer.

I know you are asking yourselves, where’s the technology in all this. Well, I did get to spend some quality time in the Succah talking to Q CLI. The other day I configured Semaphore UI (to run ansible playbooks) because I wanted to install something and setup something on all my Linux nodes. My Ansible inventory is up to 25 nodes (Proxmox VMs and Containers, EC2, Raspberry Pi’s, etc). And so I installed and setup Semaphore UI, but didn’t have any experience configuring Ansible. No problem, Zman Simchatenu, it took some conversations around all the trips, but I have some working configurations. One that installed and configured the software on all the nodes and another that daily pulls the installed package list and stuffs it into a directory. And since I have Q CLI on the Semaphore UI host machine (Semaphore is running in Docker), I can have Q CLI summarize the data and generate a nice report.

I know this is a geeky simcha, but it still makes me happy.

Moadim BeSimcha, Shabbat Shalom.