Shabbat Korach
Written by Rabbi Sheila Shulman Thursday, 26 June 2008
ETERNITY NOW?
Let’s leave the literary problems of this chapter aside for the moment—the inconsistencies, how many texts have been collated, the syntactical problems—and look at some of the issues raised by this account of rebellion, or rebellions. There is one syntactical peculiarity I would like to look at, but I’ll come back to it later.
The rebels make two basic arguments. One: ‘They combined against Moses and Aaron and said to them: “You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above the Lord’s congregation?”’ (Num. 16:3). And two: ‘”We will not come [up]. Is it not enough that you have brought us from a land flowing with milk and honey to have us die in the wilderness, that you would also lord it over us? Even if you had (or You have not even…) brought us to a land flowing with milk and honey, and given us possession of fields and vineyards, should you gouge out these men’s eyes [i.e. our eyes]? We will not come!”’ (Num. 16:12–14). The first argument, apparently a challenge to religious leadership, appears to emanate from Korach and his followers. The second, apparently a challenge to something more like political leadership, appears to come from Dathan and Abiram. Although we should bear in mind that the religious and the political are not really separable, not in the biblical text, and not, with certain caveats, in our lives.
From one perspective the challenges are perfectly comprehensible, certainly to me. They are challenges to questionable authority, to apparent privilege, to sacerdotal hierarchy. Moreover, the story follows directly upon a hair-raising incident in which someone caught gathering firewood on Shabbat is taken outside the camp and stoned by the whole community, ‘as the Lord commanded Moses’ (Num. 16:32–36). And that is only an as it were accidental stringency. Worse yet, the story ends with the rebels annihilated by fire, by plague, by being literally swallowed up by the earth. It would seem that in the minds of the biblical writers, God brooks no opposition.
From the perspective I’ve been describing, Korach has to be seen as a sort of democratic hero, an antinomian libertarian anarchist, a believer in the people’s natural ‘holiness.’ In this reading, the story is the way it is because that democratic, or anarchist, spirit must be quenched in the name of a vengeful hierarchical god whose authority must be maintained at all cost by a couple of nepotistic, patriarchal ruling clans defending their authority over the mass of the people. They defend their authority by claiming to be closer to God than anyone else, which is how it’s usually done. In this reading, the people have been led out of one slavery into another even more trying; they are no longer even sustained, insofar as they were sustained in Egypt, by a reasonable civilization. They are wandering in the wilderness, weak and sick and starving, at the mercy of a small group of grandiose and visionary maniacs on a quixotic quest. They, and even many of their leaders, are understandably fed up, even desperate.
But things are by no means so simple. The outburst of Dathan and Abiram is easy to dismiss. They have the souls of slaves. Whatever Egypt was, it was not ‘a land flowing with milk and honey,’ at least not for the Hebrew slaves. Dathan and Abiram function in this episode as the voice of pusillanimity, the voice of those who are frightened of freedom, who long for security, who miss the ‘fleshpots’ of Egypt, those who will always say ‘better the devil we know….’ They are the voices of those who have been reluctant, hanging back, all along, those who have been, understandably perhaps, frightened of a difficult passage through the wilderness to an unknown ‘promised land.’
What Korach claims—that the people are holy, and that the Lord is in their midst—attractive as it is in many ways, is based on a kind of willful misunderstanding, and a particular kind of obtuseness. The words that the biblical writers put into the mouth of God about the holiness of the people, about God’s ‘dwelling’ among them, are all statements of potentiality, not actuality. K’doshim t’hiyu, ‘You shall be holy’ (Lev. 19:2). ‘I shall make you a kingdom of priests, and a holy people’ (Exod. 19:6). ‘Make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among you’ (Exod. 25:8). The people will have to work for that to become true, and there is no time limit set. But Korach can be perceived as a kind of utopian, a kind of Rousseau-ish believer in the natural and spontaneous goodness of people. His claim is that he is merely going to remove the chains. For Korach, ‘everyone was holy who had shared the Sinai experience, so there was no need for a leader or a priesthood.’
This is in some ways a marvelous, a seductive vision, but takes no account either of history or of human reality. It certainly doesn’t reflect the complex realism of the biblical text. It assumes that we have arrived at where we are trying to go, that we are already what it is our task to become. I keep remembering an incident during the heady days of 1968, when the students at the college I was teaching at—very bright, very loveable, and incredibly innocent—occupied the administration building and hung out a huge banner saying ETERNITY NOW. Korach, of course, is nothing like so appealing, but there is a shared assumption, which in the case of my students was a consequence of naïveté, but in the case of Korach was a consequence of something else.
Which brings me by a slightly circuitous path to the one syntactical point I wanted to look at. The first phrase of our reading is to say the least odd. Va-yikhach Korach ben Yizhar ben K’hat ben Levi… (Num. 16:1). If we leave out Korach’s lineage, which would be relevant in other contexts but is not necessary for my purposes, we get Va-yikhach Korach… ‘And Korach took…’ Took what? Took whom? We don’t know; the phrase just hangs there, objectless, apparently incomplete. Unless of course it is complete, in a sense we haven’t grasped yet. Maybe that is precisely the issue, that ‘Korach took.’
Consider this passage from Martin Buber. It’s about what we can know of revelation, and begins with a quotation from Nietzsche. ‘”You take, but you do not ask who it is that gives.”’ Buber continues: ‘But I think that as we take, it is of the utmost importance to know that someone is giving. He who takes what is given him, and does not experience it as a gift, is not really receiving; and so the gift turns into theft. But when we do experience the giving, we find that revelation exists.’
There is something shallow in Korach, as if a dimension were missing. He aggrandizes the gift, freighted with hope and pain, of God’s inexplicable, demanding, life-giving love for Israel, a love as inexplicable as any other love, into something between a right and an entrance ticket to an exclusive club. Yes, Korach takes, alright, or tries to, and it is theft. If he were aware of the gift, and the Giver, he would have understood God’s utterances to have been about what the people could become, not about what they already were, and he could not so glibly cloaked ambition in the rhetoric of holiness. He would have understood that to become holy would require a long and painful struggle, and that the potential for doing so was in itself a gift.
In the end, I find myself puzzled. In many ways, I should be on Korach’s ‘side.’ I should be outraged at the peremptoriness, the pyrotechnics of his destruction. I should be thoroughly repelled at this Old Nobadaddy of a God roaring about annihilation. But while all of that is on one level the case, on a deeper level it is Korach I turn against. Maybe it’s too many failed revolutions, led by popular tribunes who became mass murderers before anybody had time to turn around. It may be because Korach sounds facile, and I know that real change is hard. But at bottom, and not merely because of a syntactical oddity, it could have been Korach of whom Nietzsche said: ‘You take, but you do not ask who it is that gives.’ If I’ve learned anything at all in the course of many difficult years, it is that there are gifts, and that it is possible, however dimly, however tentatively, to sense the Giver in what Buber so reticently called ‘the touch of the other,’ who could be anyone, a friend, a lover, a colleague, a teacher, a student, an acquaintance, or even a passing stranger.
Sheila Shulman
1 Martin Buber, On the Bible: Eighteen Studies (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), p. 10.
