Rabbi Shai Cherry
Parshat Korah
When Captain Spock died in “The Wrath of Khan” (1982), I was curious how he’d return in “The Search for Spock” (1984). Back then, I knew that the actor, Leonard Nimoy, was Jewish, but my draw to him was the character. “The good of the many outweighing the good of the few” was the closest thing to a life motto I knew.
The details need not detain us, but Spock reappears as Spock, Jr. who experienced accelerated growth from being on a planet — named “Genesis” — with life-flourishing powers. Imagine something between the resurrection of the dead and progeria. A scene from this week’s parshah may have served as the model for such accelerated growth.
The Book of Numbers, or In the Wilderness, as it is called in Hebrew, has a long series of punishments doled out to our obstreperous ancestors: bitter waters (Ch. 5), fire (Ch. 11), leprosy (Ch. 12), a glut of quail (Ch. 11) life sentences of wandering in the wilderness (Ch. 14), and, shades of Egypt, the plague (Ch. 14)! Ramban (13th Ch., Barcelona) explains that the community was so bitter after all these episodes that they were particularly vulnerable to the rhetoric of a self-serving demagogue.
Enter Korah.
Korah and his gang challenged Moses and Aaron for leadership. But something unprecedented happens. A word not used since the beginning of Genesis appears — ‘bara’ — to mark this novel and gruesome punishment (Num. 16:30). The Earth opens its mouth and swallows the rebels and their families alive!
You would think such drama would be enough to dissuade further murmurings. But another group challenges Aaron for the Priesthood. How will God up the ante for this latest insurrection? What’s God’s next act of wholesale devastation to wreak on the hapless, hopeless Israelites? (Remember, they’ve already been condemned to die in the desert.)
God tells Moses to take 12 staffs, one from each of the chiefs of the 12 tribes, write their names on the staffs, put them in the Tabernacle and go to bed. The next morning, only one staff will have blossomed and flowered. That staff’s owner is the chosen one. No death, little drama and beautiful almond buds. What happened to the wild God of the Wilderness?
Sometimes it takes a catastrophic event for us to see we’re on the wrong path. The use of ‘bara’ from the creation story reminds readers, and God, that in the beginning, God was so filled with hope that he pronounced all creation to be “very good.” In one of the only other uses of that verb, Isaiah has God saying that the world was not created to be a wasteland (48:15). After Korah’s sinkhole, how many more punishments could the world withstand before it became a wasteland? Something had to change. God made teshuvah.
Rather than death and destruction, what won the day was life on steroids. The Tabernacle was the prototype for Star Trek’s planet Genesis. Where God dwells there is a concentration of life force that accelerates growth. The contest showed that what God wants is life to flourish, and we need to provide the conditions for such flowering. That’s the job of leadership.
Yet, even under the most favorable conditions, not all the staffs will blossom. Aaron, according to our tradition, was known as one who loves peace and pursues peace. His staff blossomed. The staffs belonging to the tribal chiefs, however, did not, and an 18th-century scholar from Prague, Jonathan Eybeschutz, explained why.
The rabbis offer the paradigm of Hillel and Shammai as disputing for the sake of heaven. What’s the rabbinic paradigm of disputes not for the sake of heaven? Korah and his gang. Notice, says Eybeschutz, the parallelism. Just as the dispute for the sake of heaven was between Hillel and Shammai, the dispute not for the sake of heaven was between Korah and his gang, not between them and Moses!
In other words, neither Korah nor the members of his crew were pursuing truth and justice for righteous purposes. They were in it for themselves and their own glorification to the detriment of everyone else. Such stock will never bear fruit. The good of the many outweighs the good of the few.
Shai Cherry is the rabbi of Congregation Adath Jeshurun in Elkins Park, author of “Coherent Judaism: Constructive Theology, Creation, and Halakhah” and the featured lecturer for The Great Courses’ Introduction to Judaism. The Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia is proud to provide diverse perspectives on Torah commentary for the Jewish Exponent. The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Board of Rabbis.
