B'Har: At the Mountain

Suddenly, at the beginning of parashat B’Har (At the Mountain), G-d begins speaking to Moses “on Mount Sinai,” not, as He had been doing since the beginning of the book, from the Tent of Meeting. Many scholars believe that this chapter is interpolated from a different version and that locating G-d on Mount Sinai is meant to emphasize the importance of what follows.

for my husband

As the mountain is purely background,
part of the story insofar
as everything important happens
against it, so you are here
in this manual for priests:
Do this. Do that. There is no love
amid the unadorned decrees.
And yet, this week as I have studied
“At the Mountain,” I’ve seen your face
behind the words, not because
they have the slightest thing to do
with you, the man whose beard, whose lips,
whose gray-green eyes are the last things
I’ve looked into for twenty years
before sleep overtakes me
but because you are the ground
against which every story unfolds.