Chevre, this week’s parsha is Shoftim (שופטים). It starts with setting for yourself judges and officers. We then have the death penalty for idol worshipers and what happens with a rebellious elder. The rules around The King of Israel, prisestly gifts, prophecy, cities of refuge, and conspiring witnesses. And then we have the Torah rules for war. What happens during the war, the priests involvement in blessing the soldiers, and the required overtures of peace. We then have the preservation of fruit trees.

I always find this fascinating. Even during war and a siege, the fruit trees are not to be cut down. The idea is that you are making war with people and not nature and so nature should not be attacked. In the cloud world, we spin up and kill resources all the time, but these are stateless, they don’t have data. The things that contain the data, like databases, are stateful and need to be preserved (at least the data/state needs to be preserved).

Just like the state and data needs to be preserved in your workload to make it useable going forward, the fruit tree needs to be maintained so that it can continue to provide sustenance after the war.

Shabbat Shalom.