Korah (Torah)

Korah’s Rebellion

The anecdote is told of an itinerant rabbi in the old country who every week preached at a synagogue in a different city, and was too lazy to compose a new sermon every time. Wherever he went, he approached the speaker’s podium, ostentatiously searched through his coat pockets for his notes, pretended they were missing, and told his audience: “Ach! I lost my notes! Swallowed up by the earth like Korah! And speaking of Korah…” and would then launch into his all-purpose sermon about Korah. Evidently, quite apart from the serendipitous punch-line, Korah was quite a popular topic for darshanim (popular preachers). The chapter is filled with colorful images and miracles: staffs bursting into flower, the earth swallowing up the evildoers, masses of priests walking about the camp with incense braziers, the famous midrash about Korah and his 250 cohorts wearing sky-blue robes (talit shekulo tekhelet), etc. There are good guys and bad guys. Korah is an easy mark for ironic jibes. The main thrust of the classical midrashim paints him as rich and hypocritical: a skilled demagogue who took cheap shots at Moses, pretending to be a champion of the poor and unfortunate, while really seeking power for himself and hoping to become the “dictator” instead of Moses.

Yet things don’t seem quite so cut and dried. In our day, that damning verdict would seem to be subject to question. At the minyan where I davened this Shabbat—a group best described as New-Age Orthodox (or perhaps Post-Orthodox?) with tendencies towards religious anarchism—one of the gabbaim gave a little speech before the Torah reading in which he referred to “Korah our brother.”

And indeed, in terms of today’s zeitgeist, perhaps Korah should be seen as a culture hero and role model of sorts. On the face of it, the heart of his conflict with Moses seems to have been over the issue of authority vs. autonomy. Korah’s claim was simple: “the entire congregation is holy, and the Lord is in their midst; why do you lift yourself up above the assembly of the Lord?” (Num 16:3). And a bit later, ”for isn’t it enough that you have taken us out of Egypt, the land of milk and honey (!) to kill us in the desert, that you also lord it over us?” (v. 13). On the face of it, we have here a democratic, Protestant-type reformation: rather than autocratic, centralized, rigid, authoritarian rule, each individual should be connected directly to God.

Let’s take this revisionist, new historical reading of Korah a bit further. We have here all the poignancy of a Greek tragedy: both sides are honest, sincere, and well-meaning, yet inevitably fall into a fatal, polarized conflict. Korah served as mouthpiece for the general discontent and frustration of the public. Over the course of a few months or even less, the people had undergone the double traumas of the incident of the quail and the spies. From their viewpoint, their murmurings on these occasions were not grave sins, but reasonable protests against the condition of their life. They had long since come down from the spiritual “high” of the Sinai epiphany and the construction of the Tabernacle. There was a feeling that they were stuck in the desert, that the Exodus had been for naught, that they were wandering in circles—and when they hankered for a little variety in their dull, saccharine diet, thousands of their fellows were decimated by a plague for no evident reason. Add to that the discouraging report of the spies, and Moses’ announcement that all those who were adults would indeed spend the rest of their lives in the desert. They could expect nothing more than to plod on and on in this difficult life. In that setting, Korah came along and said: Let’s try a new leadership; someone who will be in touch with the people and seek their welfare, rather than wild-eyed dreamers who talk of entering an already inhabited land, filled with giants and uncannily rich fruits.

Meanwhile, Moses and Aaron, for their part, wanted with all their heart to convey God’s message to the people, yet found themselves totally misunderstood. The spiritual gap between Moses, who spoke “mouth to mouth” with the Almighty, and the people, was simply too great. Could it be that there was really no ill intention on the part of Korah, but simply authentic cognitive dissonance? In any event, by this point, Moses was doubtless frustrated and more than a little fed up (see Rashi on 16:4) in his attempts to educate the people and lead them to see Gods’ guiding, providential hand. His lot was, if one may say so, like that of all visionaries and intellectuals who tend to falter and fumble in mass leadership positions.

An interesting side problem: in four separate places in this group of chapters, the Torah states that Moses (or Moses and Aaron) fell on his face when he heard the people saying terrible things, murmuring against God and his own leadership, and even rejecting the benefits brought them by the Exodus (once in the chapter on the spies – 14:5; twice in the Korah story – 16:4; 17:10; and again when the people complain about water – 20:6). This is a strange use for this gesture. Elsewhere in the Bible—in some of the stories of the patriarchs, in some of the Prophets—the same gesture appears as an expression of awe and dread in the presence of God. What does the gesture mean here: Shock? Disgust? Mourning? Or perhaps a sense of helplessness, of being literally overwhelmed and bowled over by the weight of the people (Moses as much as says so to God in 11:11-15, esp. 14) when they speak in a complaining, rebellious mode, leaving Moses with the feeling that they have learned absolutely nothing from all of the good things that happened to them. (or then again, as some say, perhaps it was a kind of petit mal, induced by intense emotional upset?) But be all this as it may, Korah, sincere or not, represented a grave danger to the integrity of the people, and he had to go.

Authority, Democracy and the Role of Reason

To return to the central issue involved in Korah: where ought we to stand on this issue of autonomy and religious democracy? Clearly, the Bible and midrashim see him as a dangerous, evil demagogue, representing the slippery slope that leads to religious anarchy and chaos. Yet, as mentioned, one can imagine modern people seeing him as a hero, representing the democratic ideals of autonomy, of each man being as good as the next. One is reminded of the American frontier ethos, of such figures as Andrew Jackson, of the spirit of direct, simple democracy the New England town meeting.

Recently, there has been much ideological ferment within the Orthodox community over the issue of autonomy vs. authority. Not long ago, Avi Sagi and Ze’ev Safrai, two Israeli religious intellectuals, edited a volume with precisely that title. But that discussion is essentially concerned with the issues within the context of the halakhic system: How far does Rabbinic authority extend? Who has the right to interpret halakhah? In what areas, if any, may the individual decide for himself on fundamental issues of world-view? But these questions, important as they are (and they reflect a deep and widespread disaffection with contemporary Rabbinic leadership; we will hopefully return to this question in Shoftim) are not what is at issue here. Korah’s rebellion, at least as read by the tradition, raises the far more fundamental question as to whether any kind of norms or authority are needed altogether.

At this point, let us return to Maimonides’ comments about the limitations of the human intellect, cited last week in connection with tzitzit. Rambam expresses there a kind of elitism: a basic mistrust of the ability of the average human being to arrive at knowledge of the true, the good, and the just by the unfettered use of their own capacity for thought; hence the warning not to go astray after one eyes or heart, nor to become swept up in all sorts of inquiries into, for example, pagan faith, that may lead a person astray. There is, of course, a great paradox here: the very same Rambam believes deeply, at least in theory, in man’s ability to soar to the greatest heights, specifically through the use of his mind. He is the outstanding Jewish spokesman of “amor deus intellectualis”—the love of God through the intellect. Thus, in the very opening of his Mishneh Torah, he describes how the love and fear of God are to be attained through intellectual reflection upon God’s greatness as reflected in the Creation (what we call nature) and through the study of physics and metaphysics (Yesodei ha-Torah 2.2; 4:12-13); Sefer ha-Mada closes with the same theme (Teshuvah 9; 10:6).

The answer lies in what we have called his elitism. Maimonides does not believe that people are inherently different from birth, but there are very definite standards for human excellence—in this case, religious and spiritual excellence—that require deep and long application. In Yesodei Hatorah 7, he explains that prophecy itself is acquired by a long and arduous discipline—intellectual, moral, meditative, and social—and that only after these preparatory stages is it possible for the Divine Presence to rest upon a given individual. In the end, whether it does or not is also dependent upon the Divine Will. In an interesting manner, one has here a certain convergence of the philosopher-sage and the prophet: i.e., the thinking human mind is that faculty which ultimately brings man closest to what Rambam, in the medieval world, called “The Active Intellect.” i.e., God—but there is also an ecstatic, even mystical component to this experience as well. It is thus not surprising that Rambam’s son, Abraham, was a mystic, nor that the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia travelled about the Mediterranean basin teaching Maimonidean texts to his mystical disciples. There is a certain democracy in potentia—in theory, all men can attain the deepest knowledge of and even, perhaps, closeness to God (“take care of the honor of the children of the poor, for from them shall come Torah,” as the Rabbis put it in Nedarim)—but in practice only a select few achieve it. From this perspective, both of these chapters, hard pills as they may be to swallow—the commandment to limit ones speculation and the seemingly anti-democratic confrontation with Korah—make perfect sense.

But there is another difficulty, which is perhaps the real crux of the problem: that modern man no longer believes that philosophy inevitably leads to truth, and to only one truth. Medieval thinkers believed that it was possible to establish the truth, and to prove various religious truths, by means of iron-clad philosophical proofs. Those who differed, like the Kalaam against whom Maimonides polemicizes through much of the Guide, were simply mistaken, and their errors could in principle be demonstrated. The Renaissance and the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment began to question the old religious truths. Kant had to work hard to reconfirm the sovereignty of human reason and some objective basis for morality—but not for long. The late lamented twentieth century seems in retrospect to have been one long path leading to the smashing of all idols and all absolute truths. Today, the age of “post-modernity” seems to have left us with the utter relativization of all values, and with even the ability of language to convey meaning shrouded in ambiguity. As Humpty Dumpty said in Through the Looking Glass, “Words mean whatever I want them to mean.” The central issue is that we no longer believe in the very concept of truth, or at least the accessibility of truth. Yes, Korah would have enjoyed such a milieu: the entire congregation is equally holy.

There are those who see this as a good thing, opening the way for Judaism to be accepted in this new age as one more possibility in the rainbow of spiritual options available to the sophisticated post-modernist—and itself, of course, opening up to a wide veritable kaleidoscope of views and truths. This, in my view, is a rather short-sighted approach.

Maimonides aside, the basic attitude in Judaism is that intelligence is a divine gift (the very first of the petitionary prayers in the weekday Amidah is a prayer for wisdom and discernment), rather than the be-all and end-all, as it seems to be in modern culture. One popular explanation of the custom of wearing a head covering, specifically, is that doing so symbolizes a certain modesty vis-a-vis that organ which is the source of the greatest human arrogance.

To conclude this discussion of the conflict between free thought and religious truth, and the related issue in the following parashah, Korah, of human autonomy vs. authority: William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, presents a typology of “world-affirming” and “world-denying” types of religiosity. One might be tempted to identify the position placing limits on the free play of the human mind as “world- denying.” But perhaps Judaism has a more nuanced, dialectical position: what Rav Aharon Lichtenstein once described as “world-redeeming.” i.e., scepticism re the world, and especially the human being, as he is, but without the radical rejection of life such as found in various types of monasticism which only seek to get off the wheel of suffering, as in Buddhism, or to achieve salvation from inherent sinfulness, as in classical Christianity.

Reader Comments

This week I received two interesting reader reactions. First, from my brother, David Chipman:

The Protestant reformation was, after all, as much about the consequences of economic, technical and social change (trade, specialization and the urbanization of Europe) in the nature of civil rule, as it was about the individual’s sovereign connection to God. Today’s zeitgeist is based on the (apparent) total social autonomy of individuals: any man or woman beyond the ‘teens can pick him/herself up without requiring anyone’s consent, travel to a far-off city, look for a flat and a job or set up as a freelance writer, repairman, artist, shlepper, whore, computer consultant, or whatever—and have a chance of physical survival, not to mention finding kindred souls in some library, pub or house of worship. How can anyone who lives in our times imagine the psychological-social state of a member of a nomadic clan moving through a dangerous desert, in a world where all the surrounding lands capable of reliably providing sustenance are occupied by other, tight-knit and xenophobic peoples? In such a life experience, any serious error by some of the clan can bring disaster and death to the whole clan. The only allowable autonomy (that is, not leading to immediate, harsh retribution) would be the dangerous step of leaving the clan and setting off ALONE in the desert. Since the only means of support required land to till or flocks and grazing space, it would take more than a “free spirit” to do this. How can we think about the meaning of Korah’s questioning of authority out of our life experience?… The “integrity” [of the people, to which you refer] is in the concrete sense of survival and reproduction as against the dissolution of the grave. There could have been no issue of autonomy versus authority for the People of Israel of the desert, but only of who would be the authority and what the source of authority would be.

His point here is well taken. However, my method here is an eclectic mixture of comment on the level of peshat, of the actual sitz im leben of the ancient narrative, and a kind of homiletical-midrashic reading, in which I feel myself free to read various biblical situations and characters as universal archetypes applicable to our contemporary situation-- a venerable tradition (which our grandfather, by the way, followed in almost every sermon he published).

David’s reading assumes a functional, pragmatic understanding of the purpose, rooted in the “social contract” theory widely accepted in Western culture—namely, that social organization basically exists in order to provide protection and security to each individual. But, as is known, the Torah sees society as much more: namely, as the matrix for teaching and realizing certain values, a certain vision of a God-centered people, etc. In such a context, the issue of autonomy vs. authority assumes an entirely different meaning.

Michael Kagan forwarded to me several comments, including one from Arthur Waskow, among the founders and elders of the Jewish Renewal Movement:

Why is it Korah’s destiny to be swallowed up by the earth? Since the Torah and Prophets almost always see a “punishment” as springing intrinsically from the misdeed, middah keneged middah, “measure for measure,” “reaping what you sow,” what do we learn about his misdeed from its result? Perhaps we should hear between the lines of the story, God speaking to Korah in the moment of crisis:

“Korah, though Moses is right, you are not entirely wrong. I want the whole people to become holy, but they have not yet gotten there. Indeed, Korah, you are right—but only in potential, only like a seed. You think the holiness is already full-grown, fully fruitful. It is not. It is a tiny seed, and it needs time to germinate and grow, time in the womb of Mother Earth. Korah, what you need to learn is what it means to become seed deep in the earth, waiting for the season of your sprouting. Korah, you are as your name: frozen. You do not yet understand growth, thawing, all the wisdom a seed learns through the winter as the earth thaws and the seed sprouts. Into the earth, Korah. Learn to be seed!”

So that is why the earth swallowed Korah, and that is also why the Levites’ stick sprouted and flowered, a little later in the story (Num 17: 23): Korah’s family did learn to thaw and grow…