Chevre, this week’s parsha is Vayechi (ויחי). This week we finish Sefer Beresheit. Yaakov is about to pass on. He has Yosef bring Menasheh and Ephraim to him and he gives them berachot. He puts his right, stronger hand, on the younger. Yosef tries to correct him and I always have an image from a children’s book with Yaakov crossing his hands to make sure he gets his right hand on the right boy. He goes through his sons and gives them berachot. Yaakov dies and is buried in Hevron, right down the street from me.

Then the brothers come to Yosef, they are worried that he’ll still be angry from being sold into slavery and this causes him anguish that after everything he’s done for them since they came to Egypt, that he’ll still be angry with them. As an aside, we know that King David had his son Shlomo exact retribution on some folks after King David passed away. Therefore, while this upset Yosef, it wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility. But Yosef was upset that his brothers didn’t understand him enough to know that he was no longer bitter.

And then at the very end, Yosef is on his death bed and has everyone promise to bring him to Eretz Yisrael when they leave Egypt. And this is the end of Sefer Beresheit.

As I read the parsha this week, I could not help but be struck by how similar this is to Spot Instance. For those that don’t know, Spot instances are AWS compute instances (computers) that are extra capacity. They are not currently being used and folks can use them at a big discount. The catch is, however, that when that capacity is required for full-paying customers, AWS will reclaim that capacity and give it to someone at full price. The Spot instance gets a 2 min warning that it’s going to get reclaimed. It’s this 2 min warning that has me thinking about this parsha. Both Yaakov and Yosef are giving over berachot and instructions on their death beds. It’s this final word where they can give some insights into folks for the future.

Spot instances often use this time to stop their work and upload their status. A good spot architecture will have the instances constantly pushing their reports or progress off the machine so that when the eventual (at least for people, some spot instances can run for a very long time) 2-min warning will come, they only have to give a final update.

From this we learn (or should learn) that we should always be evaluating where we are and telling the most important people to us how we feel about them. Because we never know when HaShem will give us a 2-min warning (or maybe even less).

Shabbat Shalom