Parshah Commentary

Parshat Korach

Faced with so many of my Jewish communities excusing or endorsing Israel’s relentless destruction of Gaza, I’ve returned again and again to an essay by the 20th-century pacifist and anarchist Rabbi Aharon Shmuel Tamares. In “The Liberation of Hebrew Thought,” Rabbi Tamares contends that critiquing one’s community often involves a tacit moral compromise. Most of those who engage in such rebuke, he argues, are not actually prepared to sever themselves from the community in the almost inevitable event that their efforts are unsuccessful. If anything, by taking on responsibility for the collective, critics tend to reaffirm their communal ties, making them more susceptible to being “dragged along by the collective’s crooked ways.” Therefore, he cautions, rebuke is “only appropriate for radicals of great spirit, like the early Prophets. Whether or not the community turned toward them, they would never join the community.” For Rabbi Tamares, only one who has totally spiritually disconnected themselves from a community can critique it without fear of inadvertently binding themselves more deeply to its wickedness. Anyone who hasn’t reached this level of moral “independence” should invest their energy in mentally separating themselves from the collective rather than attempting to transform it.

The question of how to relate to a sinful community stands at the heart of this week’s parshah, Korach. When Korach, a rogue Levite, leads a rebellion against Moses and Aaron to usurp their power, only a small band follows him at first. Soon, though, the entire Israelite people has risen up in sin. “Stand back from this community,” God tells Moses and Aaron, “that I may annihilate them in an instant!” Moses and Aaron fall on their faces, crying out, “When one member sins, will You be wrathful with the whole community?”

At first glance, God’s instinct to destroy the Israelites and Moses and Aaron’s plea operate according to a similar logic: The pure and impure, good and evil, can be easily separated. They simply disagree about who falls into which category. God sees the entire people, save Moses and Aaron, as wicked, while Moses and Aaron see the ringleaders of the rebellion as evil and the rest of the Israelites as blameless, if misguided. Instead of destroying the entire community, they argue that God should only destroy the ones leading the sinful uprising.

But Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin, a 19th-century Hasidic master, offers a different understanding of Moses and Aaron’s response to God. When the two brothers throw themselves on the ground, this is not, he argues, merely a desperate appeal for God’s mercy. Rather, it is an act of admission that, as Rabbi Tzadok imagines them saying, “We are no better than they are.” In casting themselves down physically, Moses and Aaron symbolically affirm the fact that they too are bound up in the Israelites’ sin. To accept God’s verdict of innocence would be dishonest: They are tied to the community, and if the community has sinned, they insist that they are necessarily also implicated. This is not a devolution into moral relativism; Moses and Aaron still see Korach and his core followers as wicked and deserving of punishment. But there is no neat division between guilty and guiltless. They are not asking God to save the innocent—for there are none––but rather to spare those who are “merely” complicit, themselves included. Moses and Aaron, as Rabbi Tzadok imagines them, thus offer a model of moral accountability that runs counter to Rabbi Tamares’s vision of rebuke. In Rabbi Tzadok’s rendering, there is no position outside of the community: We are always already implicated in broader communal wrongs, so the only question is whether we work to change the communities to which we are tied. Ironically, our complicity can be the basis of guiding them toward teshuvah.

For the past nine months, I have found myself publicly framing most of my critiques of my own communities in ways that reaffirm my connections to them—leaning on my position as a rabbinical student, the fact that I spent the past two years in Jerusalem, our shared grief in the wake of October 7th, and the language of Torah. Time and again, I have insisted that I see my fate as bound up in the fate of my community, and that my critiques of Zionism and Israel’s war crimes are also motivated by concern for our collective safety. I imagine that Rabbi Tamares would insist that such critiques are a grave moral danger: By reiterating my identification with these communities, I only become more invested in them and more likely to stray from my own principles. But like Rabbi Tzadok, I’m skeptical that it’s possible to evade complicity by walling myself off. Even if I cut my material, relational, and spiritual ties to those communities, would I not still be bound to them by virtue of our shared commitment to Jewishness? And if I somehow entirely dissolved my commitment to Jewishness, would I not still be implicated in innumerable horrors as an American citizen, a participant in a violently avaricious capitalist economy, and a beneficiary of numerous structures of supremacy? Perhaps the greater risk is not of being “dragged along” by my communities’ sinfulness but of refusing to take responsibility for them. I share Rabbi Tamares’s despair: I do not know that they can be changed. But my entanglement with them at least allows me to try.

Aron Wander is rabbinical student, organizer, and writer.