A Tale of Two Mountains

When God your Lord brings you to the land which you are about to occupy, you must declare the blessing on Mount Gerizim, and the curse on Mount Ebal.      Deuteronomy 11:29

                Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal delimit the city of Sh’chem. Mount Ebal on the north and Mount Gerizim on the south.

                There is a noticeable difference between the two mountains: Mount Gerizim, the mount of the blessings, is green and fertile while Mount Ebal, the mount of the curses, is relatively arid and barren. (This is true at least for the slopes facing Sh’chem.)

                Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch explains the symbolism of the choice of Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim as the places for the curses and blessings. Man is faced with the choice between “The blessing (which will come) if you obey the commandments of God” [v. 27] and “The curse (which will come) if you do not obey the commandments of God.” [v.28] It is this choice which determines whether there will be the fruitfulness and plenty of Mount Gerizim or the desolation of Mount Ebal. The difference between the two mountains symbolizes “the extreme choice between attaining the highest degree of spiritual ascent and the deepest animalistic degradation, the choice between blessing and life and curse and death.”

                Ultimately, the blessing and curse are dependent upon “our behavior towards that which is to bring blessing,” namely observance of God’s mitzvot. “By our own moral behavior, we have to decide for ourselves for a Gerizim or Ebal future.”

                We were commanded upon entering the Promised Land, to build an altar specifically on Mount Ebal, the mount of the curse [Deuteronomy 27:5], while we would expect to build the altar on the mount of blessing, Mount Gerizim.

                Ḥizkuni (1250 - 1310) suggests that building the altar on Mount Ebal was, as it were, compensation for the six tribes who stood at the foot of Mount Ebal for the curses [Deuteronomy 27:13], “to comfort and calm them.”

                Rabbi Hirsch, following his own approach, notes that as the Torah was given in the wilderness, a place of desolation, so too, the first altar which the nation of Israel built in its Land was built in a place of desolation, Mount Ebal. Rabbi Hirsch suggests the symbolic significance of the choice of Mount Ebal for the location of the altar:

It was on Ebal, the bleak mount, that the altar of the Torah was built, for completely without prior conditions for it, is an Ebal to become a Gerizim through Torah. Land and people belong intimately together, neither really blossom without the other.

                The great lesson of the altar on Mount Ebal is that “the altar of Torah can be built on the most desolate soil,” and fulfillment of Torah can turn that desolate soil into fertile and blessed land.

                The choice is ours!