Chevre, this week we don’t read the Parsha, it’s Rosh Hashanah! I want to start by giving a shout out to everyone I ran into yesterday at the AWS TLV Summit. It was great to meet new friends and to catch up with existing friends. Welcome to the new folks who learned about my weekly updates.

When I used to run on-prem databases, the biggest issue we could run into with our failover mechanism was to run into a split brain scenario. This is where the 2 computers running the database couldn’t talk to each other and so both machines would decide to take over. And potentially they could both write to the shared storage causing the database to become corrupted. The solution we used, at that time, was called STONITH (shoot the other node in the head). The node taking over the database would actually go and turn off/disable the other node.

Rosh Hashanah reminds of of this split-brain. On one side, we’ve been saying extra tehillim (psalms) for a month. Ashekenazim have been saying selichot for a week and Sefardim have been saying them for a month. Rosh Hashanah is the New Year, but it’s also Judgement Day, Yom HaDin. But on the other side, we eat apples and honey and we have festive meals. I’m not suggesting to shoot anyone on Rosh Hashanah, just that we end up with this strange dicotemy.

I always felt that folks generally are afraid of Yom Kippur, that’s the big fast day, we all wear white and there is an idea of emulating angels (I wonder if the Nitro cards have an Angel Emulation mode). But Yom Kippur is considered one of the happies days because it’s the day that our sins (between man and HaShem) are forgiven.

I think Rosh Hashanah is more like a microcosm of life. Life has these dicotemies between good and bad, or difficult and impossible situations. More than the stuff of TV shows and movies. And here we embrace this weird situation in the holiday. Later, once we’ve embraced life and been forgiven our sins like angels, then we have Sukkot, Zman Simchatenu (our happy time). Then we get to reap the happiness and joy of being relieved of these burdens and we move out of the house in an expression of faith in Hashem.

I wish you all a sweet and happy new year and only good things for you, your families and all of Am Yisrael. Shanah Tovah