Korach
Numbers 16:1–18:32
I Samuel 11:14–12:22
This parshah looks on the face of it to be about priestly power. Through challenges to authority, proofs of the wildest sort, plagues, more proofs and then severe but generous limits, the relationship between the people (some 15,000 souls fewer after all this drama) and the spiritual leadership gets a firmer definition.
It starts in such a dramatic way, with the “uprising” led by Korach, who gets 250 leaders to come with him in support, saying to Moses and Aaron, “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?”
Is Korach asking to be “above,” himself? Or is he objecting to the notion that anyone be “above” at all? What is spiritual leadership anyway, and do we need it? Can we not each have a relationship with God on our own? After all, the whole compendium of halachah would lead us to engage daily, even hourly, with the manifestation of the Divine will in creating a holy community. Is that not enough for us?
Of course, the question of how to decide the nature of the Divine will evokes the need for an interpreter. Which then brings up the issue of trust — do you know that the leader is really in touch with the Divine will? What if someone disputes an interpretation and is correct in their position?
And that brings up the whole issue of who gets to interpret: only one person, everyone for themselves, a trusted group of individuals? The tests of the staffs (Aaron’s bursts into flower) help to point to the right person, or at least the right family (since no one’s leadership is eternal, save God’s), and settle the people in their fear.
You will remember that this test is preceded by the offering of incense that turned into a burnt offering of a totally different sort — of those individuals who supported the question. They brought their incense in their fire pans, expecting to make offerings, as did Aaron, and lost their lives for the presumption.
The text is equivocal here: After their deaths, God commands Moses to have Aaron’s son collect fire pans from the charred remains — “for they have become sacred … take the fire pans of those who have sinned at the cost of their lives, and let them be made into hammered sheets as plating for the altar — for once they have been used for offering to the Lord, they have become sacred — and let them serve as a warning to the people of Israel.”
Was this an offering? Are not offerings one of the holy ways this people had to mediate with the Divine? And yet, there is sin involved in the offering, and a warning forever. Now the holy center of the sacra is covered with the burnished metal of these vessels that held the hopes of a more democratic yet perhaps too chaotic vision of God’s society.
Here, we see that power then serves as a reminder: the soft wood altar is now coated with hard metal, tried in the fire of the uprising. The holy is protected, and the people are protected. A line is drawn to allow for an appropriate level of interaction. And then those who must cross that line, as some must, are given a double-edged sword, much like the cherubim at the entrance of the Garden of Eden.
The best and first of the fruits of the labor of the people. The responsibility to protect and mediate for the people. And a continual galut, a lack of place, a wandering and relying on the people to care for them, since they will never own land in Israel.
Moses is the first to feel this poignantly; he never even gets to see the land. His trial is in water, not fire: the following of the goat, the crossing of the sea, the striking of the rock. And in his work, as in the work of every divinely inspired leader, we see the seeds of change, of hope and of growth.
The forest burns to let the new seeds sprout. The flood washes away and fertilizes the plain. So we, too, watch massive change, only to discover our new growth hidden beneath the charred leaves of the past.
Rabbi Elisheva Salamo is the spiritual leader of Keddem Congregation in Palo Alto.