Deuteronomy 2:3: “Enough of your circling this mountain, turn yourself north.”

Years ago I saw a book in a Christian bookstore which was titled: “One More Lap Around The Mountain.”  That title sure can strike home to many of us.

The word mountain in the Hebrew is har.  The numerical value for the word har is 205.   The Talmud teaches that the numerical value for the word Medea, Greece, Babylon and Rome (the four exiles) are also 205.    Rabbi Yisroel Tzvi, just before he died in a Nazi concentration camp, read this verse and said: “It has certainly been a long time that we have been going around and around in exile.”

Grammatically when you put a Hei at the end of a word it makes it feminine.  So we have the word for mountain which is har.  If we add the Hei at the end we have harah. Harah is the word for a pregnant woman.  Keep you snide remarks to yourself. It is not because a pregnant woman is as big as a mountain but because the ancient belief was that if you climbed a mountain you would be closer to God.  A woman who was pregnant was considered to be close to God for only God can create life and to create a life in a woman meant that at some point she was very close to God.  A mountain was the highest you could go to reach heaven, thus a mountain came to symbolize the presence of God and the climbing of a mountain is a journey to draw closer to the presence of God.

Thus, what Rabbi Tzvi was teaching was that their exile would end when they stopped circling the mountain in exile and started to climb the mountain to His holy Shechinah.  The word Shechinah denotes the divine presence.  It is in a feminine form to express the nurturing, tenderness, and loving nature of God.

Do you ever feel like you are in exile and you wake up each morning thinking: “Well, another day another lap around the mountain.”   You feel like you are just not getting anywhere, just not accomplishing anything.  Maybe this morning you will hear the Lord say: “Enough of circling this mountain, turn yourself  North.”   The word north in Hebrew is sepanah.  Another meaning for this word is hidden treasure.    Every day you go through the same routine, you take another lap around that mountain and every day there is a treasure waiting for you at the top of that mountain.  Perhaps it is time to start climbing that mountain and finding the treasure of his Shechinah that waits at the top.

Not too long ago I was visiting the Brookfield Zoo with a friend and we were in the primate house in the area where they kept the apes.  There was one old boy sitting at the bottom of a facsimile of a mountain built by the zoo.  The mountain had to be at least 30 feet high.  On top of this mountain was some food the keepers laid out. I told my friend we were going to use yirdeu to make the ape hungry and climb the mountain.  I told my friend to focus her attention on our ape friend and picture a banana in her mind and I would do the same but picture the top of the mountain. Once we knew that ape was looking at us we concentrated for at least 30 seconds and then all of a sudden the old ape started to climb to the top of the mountain where he started to chow down. Call it a coincident if you wish, that is not my point.  My point is that until that old ape realized he was hungry he was not about to climb that mountain.  We all face mountains in our lives.  The climb up that mountain is just too high or too treacherous and we just do not have the motivation to climb that mountain so we just keep running laps around that mountain rather than try to conquer it. But what if I told you that if you did climb that mountain and overcame those obstacles you would find the presence of God who will feed you the Bread of Life at the top of that mountain. Would that motivate you to climb that mountain?  That sepanah north hidden treasure, could very well be the presence of God.