Korach

It is appropriate that I start with Korach. Last year, when I first began looking for God, I went to synagogue once and had a really lovely experience, and then I went again, and there was Korach.

This parsha reports, in the usual strange and muddled way, on a rebellion led by Korach, a Levite, against Moses and Aaron, during the time the Israelites wandered in the desert after leaving Egypt. Korach says that the entire nation is holy and who are Moses and Aaron to say that some israelites are more holy than others. Some other chieftans, Dathan and Abiram, chime in complaining to Moses for not having come through on his promises to bring them to a land of milk and honey.



Anyway, Moses falls flat on his face and says “God, please sort it out.” God says “I’ll get rid of these ungrateful people and find you all a new nation to lead.” Moses says “What, really? Fry the entire population? Have mercy and don’t punish everyone because a few men are rebellious.” So God says “Fine, tell everyone else to get away from the rebellious men and their tents and their people.” And Moses does.

So they withdrew from around the dwelling of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and Dathan and Abiram went out standing upright at the entrance of their tents together with their wives, their children, and their infants.

Moses said, "With this you shall know that the Lord sent me to do all these deeds, for I did not devise them myself. If these men die as all men die and the fate of all men will be visited upon them, then the Lord has not sent me. But if the Lord creates a creation, and the earth opens its mouth and swallows them and all that is theirs, and they descend alive into the grave, you will know that these men have provoked the Lord."

As soon as he finished speaking all these words, the earth beneath them split open. The earth beneath them opened its mouth and swallowed them and their houses, and all the men who were with Korah and all the property. They, and all they possessed, descended alive into the grave; the earth covered them up, and they were lost to the assembly. All the Israel who were around them fled from their cries, for they said, "Lest the earth swallow us up [too]!" A fire came forth from the Lord and consumed the two hundred and fifty men who had offered up the incense.

So some men make a rebellion, because men do, and God sends an earthquake to swallow up not just the men, but their wives, children, and even the babies.

Last year, I sat and read this in the Chumash during the Torah Service, on my second time in synagogue since forever, searching for God, I guess. And I thought (and this is from email I wrote that day): "Okay, god, I am NOT signing up for this. I am signing up for more good, more peace, more love, more charity, more forgiveness. I am not signing up for slaughtering babies because their fathers were being assholes."

Those of you who are actually familiar with the Torah will find it amusing and naive that I found Korach shocking, and wondered how I was going to get to God through Torah. If the book was all I had, I don’t see how I could. I don’t see how sola scriptura can possibly work. Happily in Judaism we are not limited to the text of the Hebrew Bible. The written torah is just one part of the teaching, the beginning of it. the oral torah (which starts with the Talmud, which is actually all written down now too, but continues with every teaching that every person gives at every service ... ) is the rest of it, and it is constantly replenishing itself in the interpretive actions of the jewish people. So there's a way in to it that says 'the torah is pointing in the direction of the divine reality, The Nameless One -- but all of us, including the people who wrote it, and passed it down, see only some aspects of that divine inspiration.'

So there’s my out. We can’t reject everything we don’t like, out of hand, though; we have to be part of the conversation. We have to study, and discuss, and argue. But we are expected to struggle, (the name Israel means “struggles with God”). We are expected to evolve. So that’s what I am trying to do. I am struggling here to find an interpretive way in to parts of the Torah that make me want to hurl.

So here are some of the things about Korach that make me want to hurl:

1) It goes against all my notions of justice and fairness that God kills not just the perpetrators of the rebellion but their families, servants, and slaves. Innocent people suffer because of OTHER PEOPLE’S ARROGANCE.

2) Why shouldn’t Korach question the authority of Moses and Aaron? What, indeed, makes some men more equal than others? For that matter, why should the entire Nation be holy? What is the freakin’ point of Chosenness? Do Chosenness and boundaries lead us closer to God? Do they make us better people? I hate chosenness. It’s weird and barbaric. ( I think circumcision is weird and barbaric too, but we had a bris for our son. Go figure.) I wish my religion were more universalist.

3) What’s with God then sending a plague against all the people because they complain that God killed Korach and all his people?! Really, God can’t come up with something better than “I’ll give you something to cry about!” ? Isn’t this ultimately unproductive and doesn’t it just scare everyone further? (If I were christian I’d be like, yeah, that’s why God sent Jesus, sort of like a horse whisperer for humans, because all the smiting was not effective. And then I’d have to also deal with the fact that for most of us, most of the time, neither whispering nor smiting is particularly effective. We are really good at being jerks, we humans.

Somehow this is reality through a funhouse mirror. Reality bites. Korach thinks it should be different, and maybe he’s right. But fomenting rebellion is not the right way to be right. That’s a good way to drag your families right down into the pit with you. Or maybe Korach doesn’t really care about justice and equality and just wants a bigger piece of the incense pan pie. Which is also not a good way to be right.

Anyway, if God had killed only the men who rebelled, would their families and households have avoided suffering? If God had not killed the rebels, would no one have died? The innocent suffer, one way or another. But we can ask for God’s mercy, as Aaron does at the end, when he saves the people from the plague that God sends against them. People in the Bible are constantly asking God for mercy for some people or other. Moses asked God for mercy for the Israelites about a million times, because the Israelites are not that great at following directions, even when the directions are coming out of a big old cloud hovering above a tent in the desert.

These stories are not pretty little dreams where everything turns out okay in the end. They don’t make sense, they’re infuriating, there are loose ends and there is confusion. I don’t like it. The bible is nothing like a novel and nothing like epic poetry and nothing like reading a how-to guide and nothing like a self-help book and nothing like a history book. God does stuff I don’t want God to do. People do stuff people don’t actually do. There’s a whole lot of nonsense. It’s like life.

But here’s what I see today, amongst all the stuff I don’t understand and don’t like in Parsha Korach: our actions matter, and life is not fair. At every moment, we have the power to hurt innocent people, perhaps those we love the most, or to choose not to. Korach and his men ruined their own lives and the lives of their families because they refused to accept the clear evidence that they were in a completely unfair situation sanctioned by God Himself. God obviously had chosen moses and aaron and the israelites (in the context of the story, note: I’m not making an argument for the actual having-happened-ness of the story. Neither are the people commenting on Lostpedia...) . But wow: to go head-to-head with God over who gets to put some incense in a pan? It’s totally the kind of thing us ridiculous humans would do. “I don’t care if God said it! IT’S NOT FAIR!!!!”

God does not fix the fact that life is not fair. That seems unfair to me, but it is also obviously true.

So much of finding God is discovering that things we could not bear to look at before can suddenly be borne. That whole “God doesn’t solve our problems, but God makes us able to bear them” gets on my nerves, but it does seem to work that way a lot of the time.