Korach
Numbers 16:1–18:32
Maftir (Rosh Hodesh) Numbers 28:9–15
Isaiah 66:1–24
As Camus put it, “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.” In the Torah portion we read this week, Korach leads one of the most prominent rebellions in Jewish history. An uncle of Moshe, he leads hundreds in a campaign to unseat his nephew from leadership. His efforts gather steam, and it takes the dramatic, Divine intervention of the Earth opening up and swallowing Korach and his followers to restore order.
Korach’s motives are not difficult to discern, as he had been passed over by the current system of government and stood to take the lead in a new political structure. Yet the motives of the rank and file in his group are more challenging to discern. The Torah (16:7-8) notes that many of Korach’s followers were Levites, the extended family of Moshe.
Why them? What motivated these people to turn against Moshe’s leadership when others did not? What drove them to gamble on Korach as the visionary of a new order?
A hunt to ascertain the specific communal role of the Levites within the Jewish people may be helpful here. Examining the same verse mentioned above (16:8), one finds Moshe reassuring the Levites that their job is indeed important. This implies a part of their concern was that their job was insignificant. So what, in fact, was their job that Moshe refers to?
Verse 18:6 suggests their role was to help the Kohanim (priests), but the text doesn’t say how. In a similar vein, 18:21 and 18:31 note that this supportive role is the reason they receive a tithe of the produce grown but offer no explanation of the nature of the work.
The third chapter of Bamidbar speaks of the tasks they are assigned in transporting the parts of the Tabernacle while the Jewish people travel through the desert. Yet neither can this be their primary function, because they receive no tithes in the desert (no agriculture there), and yet they do collect in the land of Israel, which is also when the Tabernacle effectively stops traveling.
Maimonides (Laws of Shmita and Yovel 13:12) offers a radically different suggestion. He says that while the Levites performed sporadic shifts in the Temple, their primary role was to serve as teachers of Torah in a nationwide public education system. This is an appealing vision, but it is hard to reconcile with the many verses that explicitly link their tithe income to Temple service and not to teaching.
Rashi (16:9 and also Talmud Erchin 11A) suggests that maybe the Levites were the ones who fulfilled the mitzvah of singing in the background during the Temple service. However, it isn’t actually clear that this practice is biblically mandated, and some question whether this was done at all in Moshe’s time.
Finally, an alternative suggestion by Maimonides says the Levites guarded and protected the Temple. But if so, how come they were allowed to live anywhere in the land of Israel and did not need to be located near Jerusalem?
I had conversations along these lines with my beloved grandfather in the years before he passed away. He had been a doctor and practiced into his 80s. But in his subsequent retirement years, he struggled to figure out his role. My goal was to help him see that while he had once been a medical professional, that was not the sum total of what he had to offer. True, he was no longer able to do some of the things that he had once done, but there were other, different roles in our lives and in the world that he could play beautifully.
The same might be said of the Levites. Perhaps their concern was that unlike the Kohanim, they did not have any single role to which they could point. They were jacks of many trades whose job changed over time and in different locations, responsible for whatever needed doing. This was unsettling to them, as it is to so many of us when we find our traditional roles changing. But isn’t the heart of devotion to play whatever helpful role is needed? Not all work is glamorous, and life is ever-changing. But it is in meeting the new challenges of the day that we step into the holy role of modern-day Levites.
Rabbi Judah Dardik is the spiritual leader at Orthodox Beth Jacob in Oakland. He can be reached at [email protected].