Parshas Korach: Overcoming and Elevating, a Lesson for Humans

 

Parshas Korach: Overcoming and Elevating, a Lesson for Humans

Here is a question on Parshas Korach…

The story of Korach begins like this: “Korach son of Yitzhar son of Kehat son of Levi took himself aside, together with Dathan and Aviram sons of Eli’av, and On son of Pelet, descendants of Reuben. They confronted Moshe together with 250 men from the Israelites, including the princes of the community, summoned for the meeting, and other men of repute. They assembled against Moshe and Aaron. They said to them, ‘You take too much upon yourselves, for the entire community—all of them—are holy, and God is in their midst. Why do you raise yourselves above God’s assembly?’” (Bamidbar 16:1-3)

 

Two hundred and fifty men…That’s not Korach and a few neighbors on the block. That’s not a spontaneous reaction. That’s planning. That’s setting about and shmoozing to encourage and enflame. So why doesn’t the Torah relay Korach’s actions of creating this small mob? Then again, one could also ask: Why doesn’t the Torah straight out say what the Midrash tells us, that Korach was jealous, that he wanted to be elevated the way his cousins (Moshe and Aaron) were?

 

Obviously, these are rhetorical questions because the Torah is full of narratives whose motivations are obscure. Just look at how ambiguously Yaakov’s interactions with Esav are described. But let’s explore one idea… We know from the end actions that Korach was full of negative feelings about the choice of leaders. We know, from the Midrash, that his discontent was stirred and enhanced by his wife. We know, from the first pasuk, that he joined himself with Dasan and Aviram, who were already marked as malcontents. He didn’t, one can assume, speak only to the 250 people who agreed with him; we can assume that there were people he talked to who disagreed … He was probably walking around fuming from within for several days before he steps forth into the parsha.

 

So what? Well, one thing about the Torah is that, in so many ways, it affirms being human. It recognizes that we have negative feelings and it gives room for them. He’s not punished for the before. The question is what do we do with those feelings. Do we find a way to understand the situation from a new angle, find a way to fix a problem, find away to take on a new role and perspective, or do we, ya know, lead a rebellion.

 

The very suddenness of Korach’s rebellion has allusion to its insipient nature. We know Korach was sneaking around because there is no statement of a grumbling started among the people of Israel. There is just Korach and Dasan and Aviram bringing 250 men to confront Moshe and Aaron. All his work was kept in the dark recesses so as not to draw attention. If it feels secretive, it probably isn’t wholesome.

 

Now, you may ask an obvious question. How is one to know if their complaint is legitimate? We see in history that sometimes change is necessary, and that undercurrent gatherings like Korach’s are powerful forces of change. … the fact is that Korach’s choice of bringing a group with complaint to Moshe could be seen as him making a legitimate move.

 

The turnkey phrase is the last line of the third verse  “Why do you raise yourselves above God’s assembly?” Korach wasn’t asking why Moshe and Aaron merited their positions; he is asking why they raised themselves above. He is revealing a lack of bitachon that Hashem runs the world even in minutia, that Hashem structured Klal Yisrael this way. He is making it personal – raise yourselves up, indeed!

 

And perhaps we should address the other side of that coin of humanity, which is Moshe’s initial reaction because, really, if you think about it, it is an incredibly strange reaction. He fell on his face before them and called on Hashem to judge the truth.

 

The most normal reaction would anger… despair… both normal. And really, probably most normal… incredulity. Moshe had every reason to turn around and laugh at what they said, or to sarcastically question their sanity. Moshe would have every right to have gone off on a mad tirade about taking too much upon himself when he faced down Pharoah or led the nation through the sea or was the one who went up to Har Sinai when all the rest of Bnei Yisrael were too afraid. Instead, Moshe took everything that they said to heart, and he took them seriously.

 

Perhaps you are right now thinking that Moshe DID get mad. You’re right.. but only later, only after Dasan and Aviram blatantly and rudely refuse to meet with him and, instead, accused him of bad leadership and even verbally spit at him in Pasuk 16:14 by saying “Even if you gouge out the eyes of those men, we will not go up.” Only then does he get angry.

 

But after the group first comes to him, Moshe really stops and worries and asks Hashem to make a judgement, because unlike their accusations, Moshe assumes that there is a possibility of truth to their accusation.

 

This piece is going to wind down ineloquently… there are lots of lessons one can take from the Parsha of Korach, but perhaps one of the most important one is that in ourselves and in others, we must recognize (as Hashem does throughout the Torah) how utterly human each of us is. You may have feelings of jealousy; you’re human. You may have moments of insecurity; you’re human. When those feelings and moments come, accept your humanity but look to Hashem for guidance, cling to the Torah for a way to overcome and elevate.

 

 

 

Parshas Shelach: The Juxtaposition of Intention

 This week’s parsha, Parshas Shelach, contains one of the most well-known stories of Bnei Yisrael in the desert – the story of the spies. Actually, I prefer the term scouts, so I will use that henceforth because it is more accurate as to what their initial endeavor was meant to be.  They were checking out the land that they were going to conquer…and then it became more of the conceptual idea of spies because from the perception of 10 of the scouts, they were now spying on enemies.

 

The story of the meraglim covers a large portion of the parsha and takes most of the attention. Following the scouting and spying, following the crying of the nation, and following the disastrous decision of a large group of Israelites to try to enter the promised land after all of that, the Torah reverts to laws, and in the sixth aliyah there is an interesting set of pasukim: “If you-all unwittingly fail to observe any one of the commandments that Hashem has declared to Moshe—anything that Hashem has enjoined upon you-all through Moshe—from the day that Hashem gave the commandment and on through the ages. If this was done unwittingly, through the inadvertence of the community, the whole community shall present …. The whole Israelite community and the stranger residing among them shall be forgiven, for it happened to the entire people through error” (Vayikra 15:23-24, 26).

 

When you realize how close this is to the narrative of the scout – separated, really, only by the command to separate challah… food of thought for another time… it makes us look back and think about the significance of unwitting actions.

 

Let’s look back at the meraglim. These men were chosen because of who they were. They were leaders, great men. Surely those men did not go with the intention of creating problems or rejecting Hashem’s plan, THAT would have been mentioned in the Torah, one would surmise. They got to the promised land, panicked, and returned to then publicly mislead Bnei Yisrael about Eretz Canaan.

 

They did something that had terrible consequences, but they, most likely, started off with good intentions. One of the most critical and fascinating aspects of Jewish life is how significant intention is. Not always, but often, one’s intention can shape, on a spiritual level, the effectiveness of one’s actions.  This is important because, if you hadn’t noticed, most of us are pretty darn human. Humans mess up all the time, make mistakes all the time, but Hashem knows that; He expects that.  Most of the time our mistakes are harmless, but sometimes they are massive. And, in truth, even when it comes to mistakes, intention matters.

 

The mefarshim actually explain these verse, 15:23 on, as referring to idolatry – when the whole group goes astray on idolatry. Basically, if you, you know, accidentally start worshiping false gods…which, to you and me of the 21^st century, sounds rather ridiculous. Religious actions, one would think, should be very intentional thing given that they are centered on devotion. Let’s go back to the meraglim…

 

The meraglim were great men. Each man was a leader of his tribe. They were devout. They wanted to serve Hashem -- And they went wrong. Should not this idea have applied to them? Did they really expect to infect all of Bnei Yisrael with doubt? One hopes not, but they also didn’t stop when they were corrected. And they also weren’t the whole community, since Yehoshua and Calev were trying, in vain, to defend Eretz Yisrael. They had warning even as they were leading the klal astray, and they, the 10 leaders, ignored it.

 

The meraglim were not evil men of ill intent. They set out with honest goals, then, unwittingly, took the wrong message from everything they saw and refused to be reminded of the wonders that Hashem does. Had they listened to Yehoshua and Calev…well, the story would be different then, wouldn’t it. For now, let us just take this as a reminder that even with the best intentions one can go astray, but once one goes astray, all is not lost if one realizes the error of his ways.

 

Wishing you a beautiful Shabbas… and really hoping I made sense!

 

 

Parashas Behaaloscha: To Stand at the Front You Need…

 This week’s parsha post will be rather quirky because, alas, I am still working my way through my pile of grading… It’s the raw side of being a teacher. Speaking of teachers, I see a particularly easy segue into this week’s Dvar Torah: How do we know that Moshe Rabbeinu was the first of Klal Yisrael’s teachers? It’s right there in pasuk 16:14 – “I cannot carry all this people by myself, for it is too much for me.” – Every teacher has days when they have just this feeling!

 In all seriousness, however, in the middle of Parshas Behaaloscha, after Bnei Yisrael are led by the eruv rav to want meat over manna, Moshe “heard the people weeping, every clan apart, at the entrance of each tent” (16:10). And he goes to Hashem fed up and frustrated. The people are too much…why? It isn’t their complaints specifically; Moshe knows that Hashem can do what ever is needed. It’s the complaining. It’s that when people get to that level of complaint, they are not able to be talked down – they aren’t able to see that they are being unreasonable.

 But, it’s also more than that. Moshe is an empath…Moshe feels their pain – his deep caring and empathy long proven beginning from the connection to the Israelite slaves even as he lived in the palace and through his days as a shepherd when he worried even after one little lamb. Imagine being an empath and all that feeling of urgent want coming at you. Moshe wants Bnei Yisrael to feel secure, which they expressively do not. He wants them to feel secure not just because it will make his life much easier, but because he KNOWS that there really is no better place to be than where they are at and they just can’t see it as he does. He wants them to understand the world with the Divinely guided senses that he has, and they can’t, and that hurts him.

 Hashem understands. Hashem sees that Moshe’s seeming anger is actually pain. And so Hashem tells Moshe: “Gather for Me seventy men from the elders of Israel of whom you have experience as elders and officers of the people, and bring them to the Tent of Meeting and let them take their place there with you.”

 Now I may be an English teacher, but mathematically speaking 70 doesn’t seem like quite enough to manage the needs of all of Bnei Yisrael. If there are 600,000 men of fighting age, then there are far more than a million in total… and just 70 elders plus Moshe. Also, if you hadn’t noticed, 70 is not divisible by 12, so it wasn’t as if Hashem was setting up a representational system in that every tribe had the same number of elders.

 Since I am an Engllish teacher, I will present a metaphoric idea. Seventy represents the bones of the nation.  In many ways, seventy is a continuum. It’s the multiplication of teva, nature, with infinity. Numerous commentaries bring down the correlation of the 70 elders to 70 descendants of Israel who came down to Egypt with Yaakov. What is important about that correlation? Over and over, Jewish society is built on 70. These were not the first seventy elders (though the first 70 died in Terebitha), and they were not the last (Indeed, did not Napoleon gather 70 rabbis plus one to try to form a new Sanhedrin!) But more than that, human civilization is built on 70. At the tower of Bavel, the Midrash says, Hashem split the people into 70 languages, and throughout the Midrash and aggadata we hear of the 70 nations.

 With Moshe and 70 elders, Hashem was laying down the foundation of building civilization, because a civil society needs a multi-faceted government. Everything cannot depend on one person or they either abuse that power or give up, the way Moshe feels in this perek, because there are so many different needs and different personality types and different ways of finding solutions. And 70 seems the perfect numerical unit for addressing this plurality of needs…an idea aligned with a statement in Bamidbar Rabbah – not connected to this particular perek – that reminds us that shivim panim bTorah, there are 70 faces to the Torah.

 This brings us to another concept brought down by quite a few commentators. Rashi attributes the idea to Sifrei Bamidbar. The commentary stems from the fact that Hashem did not literally say 70 men of the elders of Israel, He says 70 man – eesh – of the elders. He uses the singular. This, along with the description, “of whom you have experience as elders and officers of the people” lead us to understand that the men Hashem specifically had in mind were particularly unique, as Rabbeinu Bahya put it:  “G’d meant that Moses was aware that the people in question had demonstrated empathy for the people in Egypt absorbing physical punishment on their own bodies rather than inflicting it on their charges. The officers were the ones of whom we read in Shemos 5:14 that ‘they were beaten by their Egyptian counterparts’ for having displayed sympathy for the Jews they were in charge of. They had acquired experience in the qualities needed to deal with the people, and they had established a reputation for fair play.”

 Hashem saw that it was Moshe’s empathy that was causing him pain and frustration in dealing with the people, and while that did not feel so good for Moshe, it was exactly what made him a good leader. And Hashem wanted those who would share some of the burden of caring for Bnei Yisrael to have that quality to.

 It was, perhaps, Hashem reminding Moshe  - or the Torah reminding us all – of another fundamental concept. Hashem initially was going to create the world solely through His persona of Elokim – justice, but, before He began, He realized that a world based on justice, rules and laws, would not stand, and so He brought forth His attribute of rachamim, compassion. Moshe wanted help so Hashem sent him the necessary number 70 for setting up a court but made certain that those men were men of empathy, the critical characteristic of a true leader.

 And so, even as I face the chaos at the end of the school year and wonder how we survived the complaints and the challenges, I think back on my students and recognize the special and unique place they hold in my heart, and how I look forward to starting all over again next year… or I will look forward to that, just as soon as I finish these essays.

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An additional thought that came up as I was reading the pasuk: “Gather for Me seventy men from the elders of Israel of whom you have experience as elders and officers of the people, and bring them to the Tent of Meeting and let them take their place there with you.”

 I saw commentaries on the use of “lee” to Me, but as I read I was struck by the incredible compassion within Hashem’s response. He doesn’t say get these elders to help you for your sake. Hashem claims these elders. “Gather for Me.” And at the end of the pasuk, He says: vhityazvu sham eemach – they will take their place WITH you.

 At this moment of vulnerability for Moshe, Hashem doesn’t thrust another layer of leadership on him. He doesn’t say, “Okay, go form a committee to help you.” He tells Moshe to bring Him the men, that these elders will be His and that they will be WITH Moshe.

 It’s a subtle but profound lesson. When someone is overwhelmed, the solution is not to give them an additional level of responsibility…a lesson perhaps in the business world, but in day to day life – When someone is overwhelmed, don’t just tell them an organizational plan that they should implement – don’t add to their pile. Look to help them get out from being overwhelmed first. See the real problem going on.