Rabbi Berel Wein
The parsha begins with the wordthat defines its name –behar– onthe mountain. The mountain nat-urally is Sinai, and the Torah’s emphasisis to reinforce Judaism’s core belief thatour Torah is Gid-given and not the workof a committee over centuries. This ba-sic belief lies at the heart of many of thecontentious disputes that have markedJewish life over the ages.While original splinter groups, such asthe Sadducees and the Karaites, did notopenly deny the validity of the WrittenTorah as being godly in origin, they stren-uously denied the holiness of the OralLaw of Sinai and denigrated its rabbinicinterpretations and decrees. This led toserious splits within the Jewish peopleand to bitter recriminations that lastedcenturies. In all these instances, the di-vinity of Torah and of its Oral Law alwayseventually won out. Deviant movementseventually fell away from the main bodyof the Jewish people, both individuallyand as a potent group in influencing Jew-ish life and mores.The “mountain” referred to is theone at Sinai where the Torah was giv-en to Israel. It is a difficult mountain toascend; the Psalmist asks: “Who can as-cend the mountain of G-d?” But as diffi-cult as it is to ascend the mountain, it iseven more difficult to remain there. ThePsalmist again intones, “Who can main-tain oneself, in the holiness of G-d’splace?” The struggle about maintain-ing the Jewish people on the mountainof G-d in belief and faith has been thehallmark of Jewish life over millennia.It has not abated in our time. Jewish secularism comes in two dif-ferent and divergent forms. One is sim-ply that the Torah’s way of life and valuesystem does not harmonize with modernsociety and its demands. Shabat, kashrut,etc. are all too restrictive to be functionalin today’s world. The Jewish people can-not afford to be so different from the restof the world. The mountain may have hadits purpose at one time, but that time hasnow passed. New ideologies and circum-stances have rendered it obsolete. So, forthem the mountain no longer exists.A second group denies the existenceof the mountain altogether. There neverwas a mountain – it is all an urban leg-end fostered by the rabbis over the ages.In effect, our grandfathers were all liarsor naïve believers in legends and storiesfor which there is no current historicalscientific evidence. Aside from these twogroupings, there are groups who wish tobe included in the religion of Judaismand who do not see themselves as beingsecular. But, in varying degrees, theyfollow the ideas of the Sadducees andthe Karaites though they essentially alsodeny that the mountain has anything todo with G-d and divine origins.History shows that in the long runsuch philosophies and movements giveway to the pressures of time and circum-stance and eventually lose their influenceand power. At the end of the day, onlythe mountain remains as it always has,challenging us to ascend it and maintainourselves upon it.
