The Mountain Doesn’t Blink. Neither Do We.

Last Thursday night, Beth Tzedec hosted a panel that gave urgent shape to questions this Shabbat’s Torah portion has been asking all along. Bruce Elman, Co-Chair of CIJA’s Legal Task Force and a member of our own Board; Mark Ross of the LTF Steering Committee; and Noah Shack, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, sat together and laid out plainly what the Jewish legal community is doing to combat antisemitism in Canada. I left the room thinking: this is exactly what this week’s Torah portion demands of us.

This week we read a double portion — Behar and Bekhukotai together on a single Shabbat. That pairing is not calendrical convenience. It is a theological argument. The two portions form one arc, and you cannot understand either without the other.

Behar means “on the mountain.” Im Bekhukotai teleikhu means “in My statutes, you shall walk.” Together they trace the complete movement of Jewish life: ascend to receive; descend to enact. Vision, then obligation. The summit, then the path back down.

Rashi notices the tension at Behar’s opening: Mah inyan Shemitah etzel Har Sinai? — “What does the sabbatical year have to do with Mount Sinai?” Every law came from Sinai. Why specify this one’s address? His answer: just as Shemitah was given in its fullness at Sinai — every detail and sub-detail — so too was every commandment. The mountain isn’t a dateline. It is a theological claim.

Mountains and Pyramids

In his essential work Sinai and Zion, Harvard scholar Jon D. Levenson argues that Sinai functions in the Bible as the cosmic mountain — the axis where heaven and earth meet, where divine order flows into human life. That framing illuminates something important about Egypt, the civilization Israel has just escaped.

Egypt had its own cosmic mountain. The pyramid was a human construction designed to replicate the primordial mound — the first hill of creation. The Pharaoh at the apex embodied divine order. Law flowed downward from him — and for him. The entire civilization existed to serve the summit. The mass of humanity — the enslaved, the laborer, the brick-maker — existed to hold up the structure.

Then Israel leaves Egypt. In the wilderness they encounter not a pyramid but a mountain. A mountain is not built. It rises from something far older than human ambition. You cannot own it. And crucially — you stand at its base and look up, not down. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks observed that the Sinai revelation was unique in all of religious history: God’s self-disclosure was not to a prophet or priestly elite but to an entire people — “young and old, men, women and children, the righteous and not yet righteous alike.” The mountain doesn’t sort you by status. It humbles everyone equally.

The law that descends from that mountain carries this geometry within it.

What Behar Sees from the Summit

Behar’s laws are mountain-vision laws. Shemitah forces a pause in the relentless logic of production. The land is not yours — you work it; it belongs to something larger. Every fifty years — Yovel, the Jubilee — you reset entirely. Debts released. Property returned. People sold into servitude go free. These are not utopian fantasies. They are a civilizational corrective encoded into the law’s DNA — a structural stop against pyramid logic reasserting itself in a people who just fled a pyramid civilization.

What Bekhukotai Demands on the Way Down

This is where Bekhukotai completes what Behar begins.

“Im b’khukotai teleikhu — If you walk in My statutes.” (Leviticus 26:3)

The verb is teleikhu — you will walk. Not observe. Not study. Walk. Halakhah — the whole body of Jewish law — comes from the same root. Behar gives the vision; Bekhukotai demands you walk it into the valley. The mountain is not a destination. It is a point of departure.

But Bekhukotai does not end with blessing. It contains the Tokhekha — the terrifying rebuke — a cascade of consequences for those who abandon the path. On this passage, the Chafetz Chaim taught something that refuses to let go. I paraphrase: You cannot ignore trouble. You cannot throw your arms in the air. You cannot run and hide and hope it gets better. It doesn’t get better. It gets worse. Those who turn away bring upon themselves hema gramim ra’ah l’nafsham od yoter — evil that is greater still.

The Tokhekha is not ancient prophecy alone. It is a description of every moment when Jews — and the civilizations around them — chose passivity, hoping the danger would pass. It never does.

The Mountain Carried into the Courtroom

Which brings me back to last night.

Jesse Brown of Canadaland has spent two years documenting what he calls an exodus — Jews being pushed out of newsrooms, universities, unions, and public institutions across Canada. His conclusion is the Chafetz Chaim’s conclusion: antisemitism must carry consequences. Social consequences. Legal consequences. Passivity is not an option.

CIJA’s Legal Task Force — the organization Bruce Elman co-chairs and whose work he and Mark Ross and Noah Shack described so compellingly last Thursday night — has answered that call. More than two hundred volunteer lawyers have built a rapid-response legal firm for victims of antisemitism, providing pro bono representation to over five hundred Canadians since October 7: students, workers, families whose children were bullied in schools that looked away.

This is not a defensive crouch. It is an assertion: that the law belongs to everyone the mountain humbled equally, and that Jews will use it as such. Using law to hold antisemitism accountable is itself an act of Halakhah — walking the mountain’s vision back into Tuesday’s courtroom.

Behar gave us the view from the summit. Bekhukotai demands we walk it into being. And the Chafetz Chaim reminds us: we have no choice.

We do not abandon the mountain. We carry it.

Im b’khukotai teleikhu.

Take the mountain with you.