Korah

Korah's Revolt against the Judaism of Eternity

Eitan Rubenstein, 5766

This week I'd like to work through the Korah story as an opportunity to articulate an approach to the relationship between revelation and history. In doing so, I'd like to simultaneously use and explicate an enigmatic phrase of Franz Rosenzweig, the prophet of 20th-century Judaism, calling for "a rejection of the Judaism of history in favor of the Judaism of eternity."

To set the conceptual scene, I'd like to put the question of revelation vs. history in sharper contrast, from two directions. First, there is the basic problem of revelation-given-in-history: how are we to relate to the Torah-created at a particular time and place, within a certain cultural context-as a timeless, eternal text, especially when the worldview of its first recipients differs so basically from ours? Second, and more pressing, is the definition of redemption personal (or national) intimacy with God, or is it a world without poverty and war - and if both, how are the two related to one another? Both questions come together as one: how can God's presence in our midst be simultaneously past, present, and future? Two solutions have been formulated by our people. The first separates revelation from history - instructions are received in one unique moment and then actualized in a history that will be forced into that moment's mold; against it, a second view experiences revelation in its life as a vibrant reality. The former is the religious philosophy of Korah and has been revived in the 19th and 20th centuries; the latter is that of Moshe, the Tanna'im, and the Oral Torah.

Korah's challenge is a single sentence hurled at Moshe and Aharon by 200 elders in the beginning of Numbers 16,

How are we to relate to this unprecedented moment of organized uprising against Moses's authority? Our starting place is the valiant defense of Korah articulated by Rav Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin (Resisei Laila 48:7).

On the other hand, the Mishnah, in formulating its typology of conflict, states with equal force (Pirkei Avot 5:17):

Often this mishnah is read with an emphasis on "for the sake of Heaven"; I would like to move our focus to the distinction between conflicts that can and cannot endure: if Rav Zadok is correct that Korah presents a vision of the redeemed world, why is his petition rejected so forcefully in both the Torah and the Mishna?

It is absolutely necessary to read Korah in the context of the first half of the book of Numbers, as Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev does in a striking derasha in his Kedushat Levi, which we will discuss momentarily. First, in order to provide the necessary background for his exegesis, I will here summarize the events of last week's parashah, Shelah-Lekha.

In chapter 13 the spies return from Canaan: ten offer a pessimistic report of the land, while only two, Caleb and Joshua, affirm God's promise that Israel will conquer the land despite the strength of its inhabitants. By the first verse of chapter 14 it is clear which side the people have taken - they curse God, wishing that they had been left to die in Egypt, and in their despair and anger they attempt to kill Caleb and Joshua, stopped only by God's appearance as a cloud shielding Joshua and Caleb from their stones. The God-Moses post-game dialogue here shares some similarities with the aftermath of the golden calf - God threatens to destroy the Jewish people, Moses intercedes on their behalf, and God relents. But here, with caustic irony, the Holy One does not leave the Jews be, but "grants" their complaint, condemning the adults to death in the wilderness and allowing only their children entry into the Promised Land. In a moment of paradoxically rebellious contrition, the chastised nation rescinds its complaint in an effort to win a parallel reprieve from the Divine decree, and attempts - against the explicit warning of Moses - to take the land. Their post-facto invasion is crushed, and the inescapability of their fate in exile confronts them. In reading this narrative it is important to remember that entry into the land represents redemption itself - it is not a merely geographic or political event but a moment of simultaneously universal and individual import.

Against this background Korah arises, with great communal support, and protests against Mosaic/Aaronic leadership, and through them against the until-then dominant pattern of the Jewish peoples' relation with God. Rabbi Levi Yitzhak uses the linguistic similarity between "מִדְבָּר/desert" and "מְדַבֵּר/speaking," to highlight the central role of speech in the Jews' interaction with God in the desert. The story of the desert is one of words - Divine revelation and human prayer. To buttress Rabbi Levi Yitzhak's observation, I will add that the central moment of Moses's career is the revelation on Sinai - an auditory event - and, even more striking is that even in scenes of ostensible action - the splitting of the Sea of Reeds and the battle against Amalek - Moses merely raises his hands, while it is God Who acts. However, says Rabbi Levi Yitzhak, all of this desert speech was also pregnant with consequence in the world of action. It was this connection between speech and action in which Korah did not believe. In Rabbi Levi Yitzhak's words, Korah "did not believe that Moses's Torah also had ‘clothing' in the world of action"-"לא היה מאמין בזה שתורת משה יש לה התלבשות גם בעולם העשיה".

By placing Korah in the context of the rebellion of chapter 14, Levi Yitzhak sees three basically identical moments where the Jewish people distrust the possibility of translating God's word into action: 1) the people's disbelief of the power of the Divine promise of entry into the land in the face of the spies' intimidating report; 2) their rejection of God's decree of death in the desert, and turn to action in the form of the failed invasion; 3) Korah's challenge to the entire framework of Divine revelation-through-speech to Moses and Aaron. In each case, what bothers the dissenters is the uselessness of God's speech: it does not move them anywhere, it seems at best inadequate to bring them into Israel, and at times it even blocks them from their goal.

These three moments, and Korah most particularly, evince what Rosenzweig terms the ‘Judaism of history' - a perspective which understands God's presence to be revealed not in the personal experience of revelation to the individual but in the collective progress of the nation. Underlying Korah's challenge is the sense that continuing a relationship with God is unnecessary to the redemption of the Jewish people, who are now equipped with the direction they need to reach their destiny. God dealt in speech, which was already completed. Action was now up to the people, according to Korah.

But now I would like to highlight precisely what Korah is not. To paint his foil, an investigation of the image of the cloud in the desert will be most instructive.

In reading the books of Exodus and Numbers, it is easy to forget that it is the same cloud which protects the Jews from the Egyptians at the coast of the Sea of Reeds (Exodus 14:19), which filled the Tabernacle upon its dedication (Ex. 40:35), and from which God speaks to Moses in the Tent of Meeting (Ex. 33:9) and leads them through the Desert (Ex. 40:36-38: "When the cloud lifted from over the Tabernacle, the Israelites went onward, on all their journeys; but if the cloud did not lift, they would not go out..."). At night, this cloud turns into fire; significantly, this fire and cloud in combination constitute the stormy revelation at Sinai, described as "a thick cloud... the Lord descended upon it in fire" (Ex. 19:16-18).

This cloud, the constant companion of the Jews, expresses two fundamental traits of the Divine-Jewish interaction in the desert. The first is that God meets the Jews only when they are camped, and precisely not when they move; the march towards Canaan and dwelling-with-God are mutually exclusive. (It is not by coincidence that the Sinai narrative is introduced by the phrase, "Israel encamped below the mountain"-"וַיִּחַן שָׁם יִשְׂרָאֵל נֶגֶד הָהָר" (Ex. 19:2)). Second, the vehicle of revelation continues to be the vehicle of leadership for the Jews. God continues to meet and speak with the Jews after Sinai. God is encountered only at rest, and it is that encounter that provides direction to the next meeting-place. This is the Rosenzweigian sense of "Judaism of eternity," where God is revealed not in history, but in timeless meeting-experiencing-eternity-in-the-present.

From this picture emerges an understanding of Divine revelation of which Sinai is merely the most striking - but by no means the only - instance. Our Rabbis of blessed memory picked up on this is a number of ways. Most centrally, the two most basically opposed theories of revelation in the Tannaitic period - those of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishma'el - agreed that God's revelation was not only at Sinai. Not only did God speak to Moses from the cloud in the Tent of Meeting; they further concur that the content of this conversation was none other than the mitzvot, the translations of revelation into action (Hagigah 6a-b). Most importantly, while they agree that ‘general principles' were given at Sinai, Rabbi Akiva thinks that details were given both there and in the Tent of Meeting, whereas Rabbi Yishma'el's more radical position is that the revelation at Sinai included only outlines, and that the details were only provided later, over the course of the Jewish peoples' travels towards the land of Israel. According to both opinions (and especially Rabbi Yishma'el's), successive revelations were needed; Sinai itself was insufficient to instruct the Jewish people in the future.

Now I can actually formulate Korah's revolt and the two previous rebellions: the cloud which has guided the Jewish people - the same one that protected us at the Sea of Reeds and spoke to us at Sinai - is for the first time being abandoned. The man who stood in the center of a storm of fire and spoke to God for forty days and nights is being tossed aside as impotent. The experience is not simply one of revolution but of re-defining what it means to be a member of the Jewish people; there will be no future speech, and our own memories, imaginations, and strength will have to carry the day in a Korahian Jewish life.

Korah believes that this cloud is in the past: it cannot return as the manifestation of "the Lord your God who goes with you to do battle for you against your enemies, to bring you victory" (Deut. 20:4). He believes that eternity is grounded in one, single (past) moment at Sinai and not in the ever-repeated experience of eternity attained in intimacy with the Divine. And here is the crucial point - Korah stands with an axe pointed at the umbilical cord of ongoing dialogue connecting the Jewish people to God, seeing it as a confining chain rather than a lifeline. In this light those who plunge deafly ahead, believing that the Jewish peoples' destiny was revealed to Herzl at Albert Dreyfus's trial as secular Zionism, merge with the followers of Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch's neo-orthodoxy obsessed with the legally binding revelation that occurred (strictly in the past tense) at Sinai: both demand fealty to a single moment of revelation which they, against the abiding cloud of God's presence, see as sui generis. Against this, Rabbinic Judaism demands that we ourselves hear revelations today, and recognize past revelation as what they are - the words of our teachers, not of our God.

Here is what I am ultimately trying to say here, that it is moments of "presence-with" that equip us with the directions we need to move ourselves forward - these moments must be ours, and they need to be removed; we cannot merely rely on the past. But these moments are themselves incomplete; they point us only one step forward. God's presence will descend only when we stop at the furthest place its last appearance can take us; it will not appear in the same place twice. The original revelation at Sinai provides a basis for our actions and that those actions in turn undergird subsequent aftershocks of revelation. It is this dialectic of doing and learning that Rosenzweig understands and that our Rabbis of blessed memory understood before him in the Mishna. Only in this way can our Revelation at Sinai be eternal and redemptive - when we continue to hear its fresh echoes reverberating anew wherever we pause to hear it.