Chevre, this week’s Parsha is Achre-Mot - Kedoshim (אחרי מות-קדושים). There is a section toward the end of the parsha, where it talks about observing HaShem’s decrees or you will be disgorged or thrown out of the land. I have a friend who used to run a small VPS business. (He would sell web sites and basic machine access for a pile of machines in a data center in Texas). And he told me a story once about a noisy customer. It’s been a while so I can’t remember if they were being Slashdotted or DDOSed. Either way, they were getting hit with a lot of data and causing problems for everyone else. My friend had to fire the customer because of the impact on his business and that of the rest of the customers in the data center.

This is not a unique story, before the cloud, there were stories about web sites or businesses getting on the wrong side of a “bad guy” and being attacked to the point where they lost their web hosting.

When I think about getting thrown out of disgorged, it is this business that was “fired” as a customer. In this person’s case, they didn’t do anything wrong, but in the case of someone living in The Holy Land, the warning is that if you don’t follow the rules, you’ll get expelled.

Back to the tech story, fast forward to today, the major cloud providers, like AWS, have SO much bandwidth that it’s difficult to knock them offline. AND they have systems in place to fight DDOSes. So the noisy customer’s site may be slow or impacted, but the rest of the customers won’t notice.

I bless you with quiet and meaningful days in the land. A land flowing with milk and honey and Shalom throughout.

Shabbat Shalom.