The Blogs: Parashat Korach: When Leadership Lacks Humility

On the face of it, Korach rebelling against Moshe is about a challenge to Moshe’s leadership or about a desire for power. Yet at the heart of it the conflict is a deeper and older division, one based in the tension contained in very narrow class divisions and the failures of leaders to communicate. Moshe may be our beloved teacher, yet he is also defined by his own imperfections. Moshe is not a consistent communicator with the people, his strength lays in his ability to listen to God and he relied heavily on Zipporah for emotional and spiritual stability, Jethro for moral guidance and an understanding of how to lead, as well as his formerly estranged siblings Miriam and Aaron whose support is the foundation for communicating with the people, and his apprentice Yehoshua who loyally learns from Moshe yet also rises to the need to lead militarily defensively as well as in intelligence and the later campaign in Canaan. Some see the campaign in Canaan as a parallel to Avraham’s not as literal warfare but of teaching, each victory a spiritual one over idolatry and violent chaos.

Considing an alternative to the notion that anyone coming out of Egypt legitimately had a “slave mentality” of learned helplessness reframes princely Korach’s rebellion, especially given that Korach himself benefits from being priestly nobility barely less important than the kohen gadol Aaron himself. Even the average person who didn’t benefit from being a Levite still tended to be a skilled individual with some level of education. As we see, our ancestors did indeed have a mentality of rebelliousness and a frank lack of humility combined with a stiff necked stubbornness; these are traits that came not from submission but from status in the multicultural society that Egypt was after Joseph’s predictions brought people from around the world. Make no mistake: we too have not learned to be helpless even in dire times, as the past several years have demonstrated. Now is no time for despair.

After Joseph, it would be fair to say that our ancestors assimilated into Egyptian society despite Egyptians initially avoiding dining with them and Jacob’s descendants living in a separate border region. This is why the change of pharaoh ends up upsetting our ancestors’ social order. They were not accustomed to being slaves. Nor was Egyptian society fully accustomed to seeing our people as slaves either, thus it would make no sense that our people would think of themselves that way. Perhaps the truth is closer to them not wanting to leave the wealth of Egypt to travel through hostile lands in order to start over in a place they’d never been, maybe in the hope that the change in their status was only one of short-term political change instead of a regional collapse of stability that necessitated difficult choices for survival even as it meant trading “first world problems” for real dangers, constant threats, hardship, loss, and a hunger that manna alone could not satisfy.

And yet they did leave, they did this despite having to give up homes, land, and other property. This is why when the Egyptians gave them gold and other goods it was not theft since our ancestors were leaving land and anything not portable behind. Portable wealth came to define our people down to our surnames, not just in the material sense of gems or spices but in the experiential sense of knowledge, wisdom, and skill. We still all carry of these varied kinds of wealth through family trades, through religious and spiritual lessons, combined with understandings the Exodus generation lacked. When they built the Mishkan, they built more than an object, more than a space, more even than something hallowed: they demonstrated the skills of who we are passed on through inheritance, hard work, and God-given talents. During their enslavement by Pharaoh and regardless of assimilation, our people never forgot who they were.

And that lack of helplessness became the flaw that became a crack that became a chasm. That chasm may have opened under the rebellion but only because they had stepped into that space. The problem was not what motivated reproach for Moshe’s leadership, the problem was choosing reproach to address that problem instead of root causes. Instead of trying to fill the void in leadership when Moshe’s responsibilities consistently created disconnection, the rebels could have instead skillfully built a bridge to Moshe in order to help him instead of being in conflict with him. That would have allowed them to take on leadership in a beneficial way by carrying more responsibility instead of demanding holiness and trying to create solutions to problems that didn’t exist.

None of our ancestors thought like slaves, rather they all thought of themselves more like leaders as many of us do today. They all had skills. And like us they had at minimum three opinions for every two people. And like us, they need to keep seeking ways to bridge their gaps in communication instead of being swallowed by the chasms that being skilled and stubborn creates between our perspective. Yet to do that requires communication and finding a balance between needs, desires, abilities, and capacity.

Korach is seen as a representative of division, with a disturbingly poetic fate as punishment for his rebellion. Yet Korach ought to be seen as our own tendency not to rebel, not even to divide, not to elevate ourselves unjustly, but as the tendency to forget we already possess ancestral gifts that empower us more when we use them cooperatively as a society than when we fail to share them. Korach’s mistake in looking at everyone as holy is not that he was wrong, it was in the implication that he should have more power instead of giving more to the people as was his tribal responsibility. This is vividly represented by his choice in attire, all tekhelet when instead the right thing to do would be to use the sheer amount of strands to ensure all the people had tzitziot and tallitot with sufficient tekhelet; considering the ecological consequences of overharvesting chilazon (the animal that the blue dye tekhelet is sourced from), it’s a wonder that Korach’s irresponsibilty isn’t responsible for the loss of this spiritually commanded dye.

It is said that Korach’s descendents actually survived the living descent into the division Korach’s actions created, existing in darkness. This outcome reframes Korach as the shadow of Moshe, not the Moshe of growing exhaustion weighed down by age, leadership, loss, and his own doubt-fueled anger. Korach is the unresolved shadow of arrogant and power-seeking leadership that exists within all leaders before they enter the wilderness and darkness in order to emerge with the humility to bear the weight of leadership even if it breaks them. Moshe saw what Korach did not, which is that the power of God does not consume in fire to leave only ash and darkness, God sheds light not defined by scarcity and bounded only by eternity. Thus Korach was drawn into darkness by not transforming the urge to elevate himself over the people instead of walking among them in order to share humbly with them, which led him not to solid ground and instead to face the darkness that existed within him all along.

Lest this parsha end on a down note, after Korach’s debacle the humbler Levites are rewarded, with Moshe enumerating both their responsibilities and the privileges that the tribe was blessed with in exchange for what those responsibilities required them to sacrifice. They accepted that they had enough even when they were given less, yet in exchange recieved the first-fruits and best of the tithes after the kohanim had been provided for from those tithes.

Spoilers: the failures of the father don’t doom Bnei Korach. Wait for Parashat Pinchas!