Come Down From That Mountain!

Shavuot 2026/5786

Hevre/Friends,

If you're following me on Instagram — and I really hope you are! — you'll have seen my two videos exploring why the Torah was given on a mountaintop rather than in a lush valley, or on the shores of a beautiful lake or sea.

In them, I talked about the hard work of searching for the insights and wisdom, the truths and values that give our lives meaning and purpose — and how that search so often feels like an upward climb. About the courage we need when the path grows rocky or disappears altogether, when we lose our way for a stretch, or when a well-worn trail no longer leads where we're called to go and we have to forge a new one. About the confidence we must summon — that we will reach the top, even if we stumble, even if we make a wrong turn and have to retrace our steps. About the fact that Jewish tradition has never feared the slippery slope, and has never shied away from complicated or risky terrain.

But there's another reason I want to share with you.

Scaling a mountain — no matter how big or small — gives us something that standing at its base never can: perspective.

As Alain de Botton reflects in The Art of Travel, whether we're gazing out an airplane window at 30,000 feet or taking in a view from atop a hill, the shift in scale recalibrates everything. The "bigness" of our problems. The "power" of our adversaries. The outsized influence we've assigned to people and circumstances that, from a distance, look rather small. Looking at the world from height — from a little remove — invites us to reframe what feels crushing into something we can actually hold.

Beautiful vistas have a way of opening up new vistas within us. They give us room to breathe, to reimagine ourselves, our relationships, our sense of purpose.

And then there's this. As much as mountaintops beckon to us, they are, in a sense, designed to send us back down — back to the valleys and plains where most of our lives are actually lived. The point isn't only to climb. It's to descend. Peaks are what we can reach for when we're lost below.

The French surrealist writer and poet René Daumal put it unforgettably:

"You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know."

Shavuot doesn't simply re-enact the giving of the Torah to Moses on the summit of Mount Sinai each year. It calls us to remember what Moses — and, by extension, each of us — must have seen from those heights. Must have felt. Must have understood.

It summons us not only to recommit to the shared wisdom of our collective climbs, but to reconnect with everything we've seen and carried down from our own.

"Rav lachem shevet behar hazeh- you've stayed long enough at this mountain", God tells us at Sinai. Take what you've learned from being here, and go forward.

Chag Sameach, and Shabbat Shalom for tomorrow, 

Dini