Parshah Commentary

In our parshah, Korach, a Levite and a relative of Moses and Aaron, joins with other communal leaders to mobilize the majority of the Israelites against the two brothers. Korach argues that Moses and Aaron have unjustly lorded themselves above the community, condemning their rigid, hierarchical leadership over a people “that is itself entirely holy.” So Moses appeals to God to weigh in on the truth of this dispute—i.e., whether he and his brother are serving at God’s will or acting for their own personal gain. God’s answer is decisive: Korach, his fellow leaders Datan and Aviram, and all those in their immediate vicinity are swallowed up by the earth; an additional 250 people who had protested Aaron’s right to the priesthood are consumed by divine fire while offering incense; and another 14,700 others are killed in an ensuing plague.

This story proves challenging for many leftist readers. What’s so unjust about Korach’s resistance to the established hierarchy? Should we not be on the side of those who rebel in order to try and advance a more egalitarian society? The rabbinic tradition attempts to answer these questions by classifying Korach’s dispute as one “not for the sake of heaven,” arguing that it was undertaken instead for personal gain; they understand Korach as pursuing the priesthood for himself, rather than advocating a radical democratization. They even imagine him pulling together a coalition of other parties who have their own unrealized claims to power—the firstborns demanding the return of their sanctity that was transferred to the Levites, the Reubenites seeking the firstborn privileges that Reuben was denied, Korach’s fellow Levites also clamoring for the priesthood. In this view, theirs is not a righteous uprising for the people, but rather a demagogue’s power-hungry coalition.

Strikingly, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum (1887-1979), the famously sectarian founder of the Satmar Hasidic dynasty, paints a much more sympathetic portrait of Korach in his Torah commentary, Divrei Yoel. He writes that Korach was among the “gedolei hador,” one of the greatest men in his generation. He concurs that Korach sought to lead, but claims this desire stemmed from misinterpretation of a prophecy that connected his line and the priesthood. According to Teitelbaum, Korach didn’t seek this post on account of its grandeur; rather, he aspired toward a vision of holiness and perfection, and simply erred in his understanding of God’s plan.

And it was precisely his piety that inspired many to join him; they believed in the sincerity of his religious vision. This, Teitelbaum tells us, is why Moses and Aaron protest when God announces a plan to destroy the entire people in punishment: “When one member sins, will You be wrathful with the whole community?” they ask. At first glance, this is a startling plea: Far more than one person has sinned! In fact, Korach has the majority of the community on his side. But Teitelbaum explains that because many of the people were drawn into sin precisely because of the transgression of one great man—a person they respected and trusted—they should not be held liable for their sins (at least not at the cost of their lives). Teitelbaum contrasts Korach and his followers with those rallying behind Datan and Aviram, whom he depicts as protesting exclusively for the purpose of division and material gain. According to Teitelbaum, this explains why Rashi, citing the Midrash Tanchuma, states that God, unlike an earthly king, is able to divine people’s thoughts and discern who is truly a sinner. Why, Teitelbaum asks, does God need divine insight in this instance? Is it not abundantly clear who has rebelled? Rather, the midrash explains that God can discern between those who have been led astray through holy motivations versus those who pursued power and influence, even if both are joined in coalition.

All of this is a surprisingly positive portrayal of Korach and his supporters from Teitelbaum, who was notorious for his vehement excoriation of ideological opponents (particularly Zionists). And yet he doesn’t hold back from ultimately condemning Korach’s project. In fact, Teitelbaum maps our parshah’s lessons onto his own sectarian concerns, arguing that Moses pleads with God to not accept the rebels’ offerings because any project undertaken with evildoers—even if the project itself is worthwhile—will ultimately lead to devastation. Referencing the Yom Kippur prayer in which we request permission “to pray with the transgressors,” Teitelbaum asserts that one can only be in community or coalition with transgressors if it’s in order to bring them toward teshuva; in the absence of such a goal, alliance with transgressors brings only moral and material ruin.

Writing on this parshah last year, Aron Wander reflected on the idea that we are all transgressors, or have the capacity to be, and suggested that such an acknowledgement may be the only way to move others. This is a helpful corrective to the impulse to position ourselves as uncritically righteous when decrying the moral failure of so many establishment Jewish communities. In his work Tzidkas HaTzadik, Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen (1823-1900) points out that righteous people who view righteousness in absolute, binary terms are incapable of viewing themselves as sinners. A world in which Korach is either all revolutionary or all demagogue is likely one in which we’re incapable of acknowledging our own moral complexities and failures, and incapable of moving others not already within our envisioned realm of righteousness.

And yet it often feels that such humility and moral integrity are at odds with one another. As the story of Korach and its interpretations point to, it can be hard to acknowledge moral complexity without slipping into moral relativism; the binary of entirely righteous or entirely sinister rebellion seems reductive, but that insight can sometimes lead to a hands-in-the-air abdication of rendering any moral judgment. How do I acknowledge my own moral imperfection and possibility for growth while confidently believing that there are positions I hold that are vital and true? Teitelbaum’s reading of the story of Korach further complicates a simple division of the virtuous from the vicious by distinguishing between those who are misled by leaders and arguments they thought to be righteous and those who act cruelly in bad faith. In Teitelbaum’s view, those who are simply led astray by bad leaders don’t merit God’s punishment, but that doesn’t spare them from his category of “reshaim”—sinners we can only share community with if we actively strive to move them away from transgression. Does such a distinction hold in the context of the current genocide?

Korach may not lend itself to a binaristic analysis of good and evil, but the takeaway doesn’t have to be that we are all, on any given topic, equivalently righteous and transgressive, that we can never discern between disputes that are holy or profane. While there may not be any neat answers, I hope that contemplating this story and Teitelbaum’s interpretation can be mobilizing rather than paralyzing; that we can acknowledge the complexity of human motivation in a way that prompts us to examine our own flaws and blind spots while still holding firm moral lines.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.