Korah (Haftarot)

The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man

Both the Torah portion and the haftarah for this week are concerned with problems of leadership and the nature of government. The Torah portion (Numbers 16-18) tells the story of Korah, whose rebellion against the “establishment” leadership of Moses is roundly condemned. By contrast, the haftarah, from 1 Samuel 11:14-12:22, describes the reluctance of Samuel, who served as a kind of ad hoc charismatic leader of the people by virtue of his personality, to accept the introduction of the institution of melukha, of monarchy within Israel.

On the face of it, the juxtaposition of these two stories seems to present a stark contrast. In the Torah story of Korah, the rebellion is seemingly against the very idea of any form of centralized leadership; Korah’s slogan is the populist cry, “the entire people is holy” (Num 16:3). A traditional critique of this incident is that: a) Korah’s approach would lead to total anarchy and the dissolution of all religious, ethical and social norms; and b) that Korah was in any event disingenuous, a rabble rouser who stirred up the people while hiding his true intentions. He was a demagogue, who presented specious, allegedly “democratic” or “egalitarian” justifications for condemning the leadership of Moses, but who in fact sought to wrest rulership for himself, together with the perquisites that he imagined went with it. (This is the main thrust of several Rabbinic midrashim; in fact, in Hebrew the “completely blue garment” [tallit shekulo tekhelet] worn by Korah is a byword for pretentious hypocrisy. See Numbers Rabbah 18. 2-4, esp. §3). Our haftarah is, in practice, the continuation of what is told in 1 Samuel 8, in which Samuel first relates to the people’s demand for a king. The people are unwilling to suffice with the intermittent, very personal and unofficial leadership of the judges in general, or of the ”seer” Samuel in particular. They want a king, “like the other nations” (1 Sam 8:5). Their demand was, so to speak, for “more” leadership rather than for “less.”

There are two separate responses to this request:

1) The pragmatic argument: In a passage known in Hebrew as mishpat hamelekh (“the law of the king”; 8:11-18), Samuel enumerates the numerous burdens the king will impose upon them: he will draft their sons and menfolk to drive his chariots and labor in his fields, and their daughters as staff for the royal household; he will confiscate their property and livestock as he sees fit; etc. In short, the monarchy will be an expensive encumbrance.

2) The theological argument: But even before this, God tells Samuel that “It is not you that they have rejected, but Me that they have rejected from ruling over them” (v. 7). According to this approach, the rule of God and the rule of man are mutually exclusive. True allegiance to God requires direct submission to Him, and to the charismatic leader who speaks in His Name (whether this charismatic leader may himself turn out to be a charlatan is a very real problem, deserving separate discussion; the issue is breached neither by the text nor, surprisingly, by Buber). Political leadership derives its authority from the Divine inspiration that moves it (at times in the literal sense; see the “band of prophets” in 10:5-6, 10-12, which Saul joins). In brief, they are prophets, who act as no more than conduits for the Divine word.

Martin Buber, in a series of important books (Moses; The Prophetic Faith; The Kingdom of God), develops the thesis that these chapters reflect the original, pristine biblical ideal: that of a society guided directly by God and by charismatic leaders who act in His name. Buber saw later biblical developments—the Davidic dynasty, the priesthood, the codification of the Torah—as a compromise with and withdrawal from this ideal.

In Chapter 12, which we read as the haftarah, Samuel is resigned to the fact that the people will have a king, and gathers them at Gilgal to “renew the kingdom”—i.e., to formally proclaim Saul as monarch. But between the lines, if not more overtly, one clearly feels his ambivalence, and his bitter disappointment in realizing that the people are unable to live up to the pristine ideal of God alone being their King. He begins by reviewing his own record of leadership (vv. 2-4), emphasizing his scrupulous honesty in terms reminiscent both of Abraham (Gen 14:22-24) and of Moses in this week’s portion (Num 16:15). He then presents a capsule historiography of Israel until that time. He begins by reviewing the miracles and wonders that God had wrought with them in the past, from the Exodus until the present day. In the difficult verse 11, he mentions the judges sent by God to deal with past dangers: specifically, Jerubaal (i.e., Gideon); Bedan (variously interpreted, by Hazal, the Targumin, the Peshitta, the Septuagint and the Vulgate, as either Samson, Barak or Deborah, or possibly even Avdan or ‘Avdon, the minor judge mentioned in Jdg 12:13 [Mandelkern]); Jephthah (see next weeks’ HY); and himself. It was only after Nahash the Ammonite scared the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead, threatening to poke out their right eyes, that they turn to him with their plea to anoint a king (v. 12, referring back to the previous chapter, 1 Sam 11). But this doesn’t make much sense, because Saul had already been anointed king by that time, and had in fact led them to victory over Nahash; if anything, the debacle at Even ha-Ezer, when the people were soundly routed and the ark of the covenant was taken by the Philistines, where it remained for an extended period (1 Sam 4) should have been the cause of their disheartening!

Samuel goes on to tell the people, in almost dismissive tones: “Now here is the king that you have chosen,” as if foreshadowing his later disappointments in Saul (v. 13; no longer he “whom the Lord has chosen” and “like whom there is none other in the entire people,” as he was in 10:24; see also my own lengthy discussion of Saul and Samuel in HY II: Ki Tisa). In verse 12, there is an explicit contrast between human rule and the preferable Divine rule: “You said to me, let a king rule over us; but the Lord your God is [already] your king!” He concludes the speech by assuring the people that (by implication: even though they’ve done this foolish and rebellious thing of asking for a king), if they fear God and obey His voice, all will yet be well with them.

He then performs a symbolic act, calling upon God to bring thunder and rain at the height of the wheat harvest,to illustrate “your great wickedness in the eyes of the Lord in asking for yourself a king” (12:17). Samuel once more emphasizes that their success or failure as a people will depend, not upon the talents or skills of the king, but upon loyalty to God; he concludes with a blessing that “the Lord will not cast away his people, because of His great name.”

The mention of the motivation of fear as being crucial in their asking for a king is quite interesting. Fear plays a powerful psychological role in popular decisions regarding rulers; many is the dictator, the proverbial “man on the white horse,” who has come to power on the crest of a wave of national fearfulness. Fear has certainly played a role in recent Israeli history. Why is terror called terror, if not because a predominantly psychological weapon? Somehow, the death of twenty civilians is infinitely more frightening and demoralizing than the death of 20 soldiers on the battlefield, even though the latter are also someone’s sons, lovers, husbands, brothers, etc?

Gideon, Abimelech, and Yotam’s Parable

It is instructive, to gain a fuller picture of the background of this incident in 1 Samuel, to turn to the Book of Judges, where we find two incidents related to the monarchy. After successfully warding off the Midianite threat to the people of Israel, Gideon is asked to be the first ruler in a hereditary dynasty (“rule over us, you and your son and your son’s son”), but rejects the offer out of hand, on the ground that “the Lord will rule over you” (Judges 8:22-23).

Following Gideon’s death, his son Abimelech, with the support of the “nobles of Shechem,” seizes the mantle of rulership by brute force, perpetrating a blood bath against his seventy brothers, whom he sees as rivals to his power. His brief reign proves to be a destructive one, filled with blood and fire (see Ch. 9).

It is in this context that we read Mashal Yotam, the “parable of Yotham.” The youngest brother, who somehow survived the bloodbath, stands at the top of Mount Gerizim and delivers a parable on the meaning of kingship, heavy with irony and sarcasm—and then flees with his life (9:7-15). The trees wished to anoint a king. All the useful trees—the olive, the fig, the grapevine—reject the offer. “Shall I leave my fatness/sweetness/wine” that bring such benefit to mankind “to go sway over the trees?” Only the bramble—a lowly bush, without shade, brittle and full of thorns, but that burns with intense heat— jumps at the chance. But he himself warns that, in the end, “fire shall come out of the bramble and consume the cedars of Lebanon” (9:15). So it is too with human monarchs. Indeed, Yotam is almost modern in his cynicism: only those who have nothing better to do go into politics.

Finally, to return to our original question about the relation of the Torah portion to the haftarah: are the two really diametrically opposed, or is there some inner thread connecting them? “Moses and Aaron among His priests, Samuel among those who call on His Name” (Ps 99:10). Both Moses and Samuel may be seen as exemplars of the biblical ideal of charismatic leadership, of prophets who ruled by virtue of the word of God, and saw their task as guiding the people with the Divine spirit. The attacks on them came from opposite directions: Korah sought to challenge the legitimacy of their rule, if not the concept of leadership per se; the people, in the days of Samuel, were unwilling to suffice with the ephemeral, transient sort of leadership he represented, but sought a permanent, hereditary institution. Yet in the essential conception and the manner in which they performed their task, the two were quite similar: prophetic, rather than regal, figures.

Today, in a world in which there are neither prophets nor kings (at least not in Israel nor in the Western world, save in the ceremonial sense), what lesson about the desired form of political leadership may we derive from these chapters? On the one hand, the religious person must strive to implement the values of justice and righteousness within society—and to do so is impossible without political tools. In any event, government is necessary, if only because the alternative of anarchy is worse. “Pray for the welfare of the government, for without it men would swallow one another whole” (Avot 3:2). On the other hand, one also needs a healthy dose of realism, if not scepticism, towards any regime, based on a keen awareness of the imperfection of any and all forms of human rule, as such. Perhaps, like Samuel, the role of the religious Jew is to be the conscience of society, to constantly demand a higher level of ethics and justice, of passionate dedication to the Judaic ideal of being “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”