Hello everyone and welcome once again to the Temple Institute Parsha class. My name is Gedalia
Meyer and I am podcasting from Maale Adumim in Israel. We human beings are strange animals. We
are creatures of contrast. We love and we hate. We get excited and we get bored. We pride ourselves
on our intellect and we run our lives by our emotions. We thrive on our independence from
others and we cave to the whims of society. There are so many more contradictions that we all know
that we are almost defined by them. Many of them are not so problematic. They reflect
the complexity of our personalities and demonstrate that we are not mere robots.
But while this is a great spin on our contradictory nature, it has its limits.
Take that example of independence versus following the herd.
This is an almost ubiquitous feature that we share. We fiercely defend our independence from
all outside influence, seeing any challenge to independence as a form of slavary.
But at the same time we readily submit to the first trend or opinion that comes around.
This certainly does seem to be a contradiction in the personality. If we really were so proud
of our so-called independence why do we buckle so readily? Conversely, if we are basically happy
with our submission to the herd mentality, why do we insist that we are each our own person?
This contradiction is probably rooted in our development as people. We start off as little
children, totally dependent on parents for everything, and totally submissive to their
commands. As we grow, we gradually learn the art of rebellion. It takes many forms - against
parents, against teachers, or against any figure of authority - depending on how powerful the
drive is. But that need to go along with whatever is in vogue remains as a relic
from our origins. We are followers and we are rebels, depending on how the mood suits us.
Of course, there is a wide spectrum upon which we all fit somewhere.
Some are more on the independence side of the scale while others fit better with the herd.
We can see this in our own personality and in that of others.
It is not unusual that a person on one side of the spectrum finds a person on the opposing side to be
absolutely beneath the bar of contempt. We all have our leanings and in this particular arena
they tend to run pretty deep. The stakes are high in this matter and we all have to live with the
consequences of our proclivities. This week s Parsha is called Korach.
That word is actually a name - the name of a famous and infamous figure out of the Bible.
He was the leader of a notorious rebellion against the authority of Moshe, and, indirectly,
God. His rebellion and its consequences take up almost the entire Parsha in one form or another.
It is considered to be a classic case of a rebellion for nefarious purposes.
It began with bad intent and it ended with a flourish of drama and resentment.
The basic story is that this guy Korach came up with the idea that Moshe and his brother Aaron,
the High Priest had usurped too much authority for themselves. Strictly speaking this was a
rebellion against the priestly class called Kohanim. It happens that Korach himself
was of the tribe of Levites, of which the Kohanim were a subset. So this was really an
intra-tribal battle between the commoners of the tribe and the priests. But the Levites had already
been granted their own set of responsibilities and privileges, so it is difficult to understand why
them, of all people, should have been the ones to succumb to this temptation of rebellion.
On top of that, the followers of Korach in this rebellion were from a different tribe
altogether. They came from the tribe of Reuben - a respectable group in their own right but
having no claims whatsoever on anything to do with the priesthood. It is actually unclear in
the Parsha what motivation these followers had in this whole thing, being as they really had
no skin in the priest game. They just seemed to have been dragged in for no reason whatsoever.
We gain an idea of the purpose of the rebellion from two different sets of verses. The first is
apparently a collective statement from the entire group, You have gone too far. All the people in
the community are holy, and God is with them. Why are you setting yourselves above God s assembly?
The second is from two of the Reuben contingent named Datan and Aviram.
They seem to have a private beef against Moshe, Isn t it enough that you brought us out of a land
flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the desert! What right do you have to
set yourself above us?You didn t bring us to a land flowing with milk and honey, or give us an
inheritance of fields and vineyards. Do you think you can pull something over our eyes?
There appear to be two distinct facets to this rebellion. Korach, presumably,
objected to the unique authority given to the priesthood and felt that it should be shared by
all the people. He wanted an egalitarian religion with no one group pulling the spiritual strings.
Datan and Aviram, on the other hand, seem to have a gripe about the fact that Moshe had
never made good on the promise of bringing into the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey.
He had effectively pulled the wool over their eyes in this whole great misadventure.
This second problem was an outgrowth of the disaster of last week s Parsha with the rebellion
of the spies in doubting that the attempt to take the land of Israel would be successful.
The consequences of that, of course, were that the entire generation who had expressed these thoughts
would have to die in the desert and never make it into the Holy Land.
So this second facet of the Korach rebellion was really a byproduct of those consequences.
These guys, apparently, couldn t live with those consequences and joined this other rebellion out
of simply common cause against Moshe. The rebellion ended in abject failure,
with the rebels being drawn into a Biblical version of a sinkhole somewhere out in the desert.
This wasn t the actual end of the problems associated with the rebellion,
as the rest of the people seemed to take up the cause in protesting, You have killed God
s people. To stave off this secondary rebellion Moshe quickly arranges a demonstration with these
staffs representing each tribe. When they were all placed in front of the Ark of the Covenant,
a classic Biblical miracle occurred. Of all the staffs, only that representing Aaron,
and by extension, the tribe of Levi, blossomed with ripening almonds. This effectively quelled
the rebellion but not the resentment. On the contrary, it seemed to evoke a feeling of doom,
as stated in the common reaction, we are all going to die . As a result of this, the laws stating
that only the Levites would be permitted to approach the Ark in any way, while everyone else
understood that it was out of their domain. But what really was this rebellion all about?
It seems to have been motivated by the simple desire to rebel against authority, whether that
was the authority of Moshe or the authority of the priesthood. This motivation stands opposed to the
earlier rebellions of the Golden Calf, the spies, and the various complaints about food and water.
Those all had some sort of genuine reason behind them, as perverted as it might have
been. They feared for their lives or they sensed that God had abandoned them. In this case,
there was nothing other than rebellion for the sake of rebellion. It was a general sense of
anger and disappointment with their circumstances. They took things out on Moshe and the priesthood,
but they were really upset with the way things had worked out for themselves.
There is a fascinating element to all this. These people wanted, on the one hand, to escape the high
hand of religious authority. They resented the patriarchal priesthood structure, even though
it was so effective in performing its tasks and achieving some sort of communion with God. They
also resented the authority of Moshe, even though he had actually made good on most of his promises,
only failing in certain things because of the lack of faith of the Israelites. On the other hand,
they were falling into line with a popular rebellion that really had nothing going for
it and representing no great cause. Even after it was shown that the rebellion was a failure,
they refused to throw in the towel, complaining to the very end that things were bad.
In a sense, this is that contradiction raising its head in a collective manner. They rebelled against
authority, claiming that everyone shared equally in the holiness of the cause. But when push came
to shove, they were all just followers of a cause that they really had nothing to do with.
If they truly had been motivated by the desire for independence and individuality, they would never
have fallen for such a ridiculous rebellion. They wanted to shake of the force of authority over
them, only to allow themselves to be sucked into a different vortex of dependence.
We live in an age in which both of these pulls manifest themselves almost daily in our lives.
Never before has the desire for independence and the shirking of authority of any sort
been such a powerful voice in humanity. We wish to overthrow anything and everything, and remake the
world in whatever image fits our personal goals. But we also find ourselves completely subservient
to the whims and pulls of forces that are entirely beyond our control. This, of course,
is the ubiquitous power of social media, which permeates our lives in ways that we are both
aware of and also scarcely notice. Who hasn t been subject to the enormous pull of everything on the
Internet, being consciously or unconsciously drawn into things that we really have no
interest in whatsoever. But we all know that we lack the internal power to resist this pull,
since it is everywhere we turn. This incredible experiment in psychology
and mob mentality is unprecedented in human history. We are all subject to it,
and have willingly volunteered ourselves as the guinea pigs for the project.
The drive for independence is rooted in something that is quite noble,
if indeed it comes from a noble motivation. Korach was on to something when he expressed that
everyone possessed some element of holness. But he overstepped his bounds and demanded too much.
All the others in his rebellion were really being pulled along like puppets on a string,
joining a hopeless cause for no reason other than it was popular to do so.
We face a similar version of this rebellion every day of our lives. If we really wish to
be the ones guiding our own lives, independent of outside forces, we have to realize how much
we have allowed ourselves to be pulled and shaped into followers of the mob. Shabbat Shalom!