This week’s portion, Korah – named after its protagonist – brings home an important point about opposition and factions in Judaism: Both are not welcome. The story is well known: Moshe encounters an opposition in the desert; he calls God for help; God kills them all. End of story. No other reported accounts of opposition appear throughout the forty years of wondering the desert. A very effective lesson.
I would like today to dedicate my limited space to a closer look at that story, and see whether the point about controversy – which, of course, failed as a matter of principle in Judaism ever since, as Halacha is the place for finding a plurality of opinions – was justified in the first place.
Korah and His Followers – The Text
The story of Korah and his band of supporters (or, as they may be called today, his “posse”), is much more interesting and nuanced than appears at first site – the way it is abbreviated above, for example, which is the common (abbreviated) form of telling that story.
Our first encounter with the figure of Korah is as a Levite – a servant of God, a person who has a special status among the many former servants who by now are walking for a little over a year in the desert. Recall also that only recently those people have accepted – in essence – their divine death sentence, as they all – as a generation – were judged to not enter the Promised Land by virtue of their collective adoption of the libelous report issued by the Spies. So the People are angry; they are frustrated; they are tired; and they just learned that there’s no end in sight. With such leadership, it should not come as a great surprise that opposition emerges.
What is interesting about Korah’s actions is how calculated they are. Again, Korah himself is no shrinking violet – he’s a member of (in today’s terms) the North-Eastern Elite. But he doesn’t stand alone; along for the ride he brings an all-star team of 250 “chieftain of the community, chosen in the assembly, men of repute.” (Numbers 16:2) (Etz Hayim trans.). Then these 250 “men of repute” gather, publicly, against Moshe. But in a very clever political maneuver, they do not argue that he never fulfilled his campaign promises, or that the water is no longer tasty. They do not argue that they should arrive in Israel way prior to the forty-year mark, or that Moshe is no longer fit to lead.. Instead, Korah raises a philosophical-religious point, which is not only more sophisticated than the ones you even hear today in political rallies across the world; rather, it is a point which remains without a good retort until today. And here is Korah’s crystallized, short-but-crisp argument:
The entire People – everyone – is holly, and God is within them; Why would you [Moshe and Aharon] raise yourselves above the God’s congregation? [Num. 16:3]
Note that the argument, which is multifaceted, contains two political-science concepts: First, equality. Everyone is equally holly; God resides within all of us equally. Why would you stand above us? [The notion of equality, as it conflicts with the idea of human leadership (as opposed to divine leadership by God), was a source of great contention among Halachic scholarship. Our sages, who were experts on providing catchy phrases as answers to incredibly complex issues, tried to solve this dilemma with the famous (paradoxical) statement that the human leader is “a first among equals.”] Second, and very close to equality, is the populist notion of the sovereignty of the people (a variation on the theme of the notion of direct democracy as introduced by the ancient Greeks): We, the people, are all capable of leading ourselves; why should you select yourselves to do the job for us?
Note that though the argument is a direct attack on Moshe, it is not, at least on its face, either a direct attack on God (which is represented, according to the story, by Moshe) or a direct endorsement of Korah (or any of his people) as alternative leaders. All it says is that since we are all equal no one human should feel – and act as if they are – superior.
Clearly, however, Moshe understands the challenge well. In a series of elaborate maneuvers – which involve fire, sacrifice, dramatic showing, and, of course, the by-now-unavoidable plea by Moshe to an angry God not to kill all of them (“would one person sin and You shall be wrathful on his entire community? – Moshe “kills the opposition” by creating a miracle, whereas “and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them whole with their households, all Korah’s people and all their possessions, they went down alive into hell, and the earth closed over them and they vanished from the congregation.” (Num. 16:32-33).
Lessons from the Korah Story
What are the lessons of this story? Clearly, first and foremost – just as we learned in the story of the sons of the High Priest who dared suggest additional (“foreign”) fire and were killed for that – opposition to God, and in particular to his only true messenger, Moshe, is forbidden, and punishable by death.
Second, we learn that ever since early history, every society – even one governed by a true slave of God, a person who is extremely humble and always thinks about the good of the community – would, at some point, yield a band of strong opposition. The Founding Fathers have hoped that this would not happen here in America (see Federallist No. 10 on “factions”). Others may have hoped that it would not happen in the Promised Land itself (indeed, throughout the first 29 years of its existence, between 1948-1977, Israeli was ruled by one party only (not to mention one person, who, eventually, was voted out by his own ruling party). But it happened both in Israel and the U.S., as it happened in every democracy before or since. The question of whether democracy is the best form of government has also been resolved, or so it seems, following a horrible world war. Still, it is useful to compare those models to the God-centered, one-man model that rejected the notion of opposition with all its might.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that even within Judaism, the idea of one-view-trumps-all was rejected eventually, and rejected entirely. The entire Halachic canon – the Mishna, the Talmud, the Tosfot, the Q&A, and many, many other documents – are rife with opinion pluralism. Even this humble blog represent yet another drop in the ocean of Jewish pluralism. And that’s the model which, eventually, won. So thank you Korah for your important lesson, and our sincere regrets for your bad timing.
Shabbat Shalom.
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