Parshah Commentary

When God calls out to Moses from the burning bush and tells him of the role he must play in liberating his people, Moses protests his divine vocation: “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites from Egypt?” he asks. After God reassures him, Moses continues to question the choice, ultimately begging, “Please, my Lord, make someone else Your agent.”

Unlike Moses as he faces his future, we readers understand that the obscure, if not outright arbitrary, logic of election is a theological leitmotif. In 1942, the great German Jewish philologist Erich Auerbach pointed out that, in contrast to the Homeric epics, which focus on the ruling class, the personages of Biblical narratives often have humble origins and undergo tremendous upheavals in their fortunes as a result of God’s attention. For them, the often unexplained allocations of divine favor to individuals and groups—from the vocations of Abraham and Moses, to the priestly elevation of the Levites, to the election of Israel from among the nations—entail social and political consequences for everybody.

This week’s parshah begins with Korach, a Levite, challenging the authority of Moses (and Aaron): “You go too far,” Korach tells the brothers. Backed by 250 influential Israelites, Korach appears to be staging a coup. In this moment, Moses’s own words at the burning bush come back to haunt him in the voice of another: Who, after all, is Moses, that he should lead Israel? There is, however, a critical difference between Moses’s protest and Korach’s. When Moses asks this question, he presumes that there must be somebody else more fit for the role God imposes on him; when Korach re-poses the same question, it is not in order to position himself as a superior chieftain so much as to question the Israelite hierarchy itself. “For all the congregation is holy,” Korach argues, repeating for emphasis, “all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above the congregation of the Lord?”

The medieval midrash Bamidbar Rabbah interprets Korach’s assertion as a reference to the revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai. The Rabbis imaginatively elaborate on Korach’s argument: “If you [Moses] alone had heard it [the Torah] while they [the Israelites] had not, you could have claimed superiority,” but the Torah has been given to “all the congregation, all of them.” Moses’s personal uncertainty thus returns to him as radically egalitarian political critique.

This story is probably best known as the moment in the Torah when God abandons a heretofore abiding norm of inflicting collective punishment. Although God initially moves to smite the people as a whole as punishment for Korach’s offense—his defiance of a divinely ordained hierarchy—Moses and Aaron beg God to reconsider, and ultimately the majority of the Israelites are spared while Korach, his supporters, and their families are “swallowed up” by the earth. Readers may be inclined to celebrate this movement away from notions of collective guilt as a step toward justice—and it is that. Yet it also betrays the brittle authoritarianism of theocracy. (Interestingly, Auerbach notes a certain continuity between that theocracy and the text that represents it: Biblical narrative, he writes, is “tyrannical,” “autocratic,” and “levies a claim to absolute authority.”) Korach’s criticism is a reasonable one, but God has no answer for it except retributive violence.

Korach has therefore proven troubling for traditional commentators, who offer up a surfeit of justifications for his fate in a centuries-long midrashic display of what Freud called “kettle logic”: a series of independently plausible but mutually contradictory explanations. This makes good sense, though, once we understand that the trouble with Korach is a symptom of a trouble with God—a trouble that cannot be repressed quite as efficiently as Korach is swallowed up by the earth.

Consider Moses’s response when he hears Korach’s complaint: He “falls upon his face.” In Bamidbar Rabbah, the Rabbis interpret this reaction as an expression of Moses’s fear concerning the “dissension” of these rebellious Israelites, “for this was already their fourth offense.” To explain this interpretation, the Rabbis relate a parable: “The matter may be illustrated by the case of a king’s son who had offended his father and for whom his [the king’s] friend had effected a reconciliation once, twice, and three times. When he offended a fourth time, the king’s friend lost courage. ‘How many times can I trouble the king?’ he thought.” The Rabbis apply this parable to the parshah by enumerating the Israelites’ previous offenses against God and Moses’s repeated intercessions on their behalf: first, the incident of the Golden Calf; next, the episode in which God reacts to the Israelites’ “bitter complaints” with a raging fire; and third, when the people attempt to return to Egypt and God threatens them with pestilence. “When the dissension of Korach broke out,” the midrash explains, Moses said: “‘How many times can I trouble the Omnipresent One?’ Consequently, ‘When Moses heard this, he fell upon his face.’”

The connection between the parable and the parshah seems fairly obvious. In Rabbinic parables, “the king” almost always represents God, and there is plenty of traditional precedent for representing the relationship between God and Israel as a paternal-filial one. So the son (Israel) offends the king (God) three times, and on each of those three occasions, the king’s friend (Moses) brokers a reconciliation on the son’s behalf. But by the fourth instance, he worries he has tested the king’s patience too much and grows afraid of what might happen if he were to further trouble him.

Like many midrashic parables, however, this one turns out to complicate the text it is invoked to explain. While the parable helps the Rabbis explain why Moses “falls upon his face” when Korach confronts him, it also represents a triangular relationship that cannot be smoothly transposed onto the parshah. Recall Korach’s argument: “For all the congregation is holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above the congregation of the Lord?” The critique depends for its force on the fact that Moses and Aaron are members of the “congregation of the Lord” above which they wrongly “raise themselves.” In principle, from Korach’s perspective, Moses is not meaningfully different from himself; they are both, equally, Israelites. If the parable represented this situation more exactly, it would be a parable about a king with two sons, a bad son who misbehaves (Israel) and a favored son who intercedes (Moses). Instead, the Rabbis tell of a friend to the king, someone with whom the son has nothing explicitly in common, neither blood nor station. While this setup exempts the friend from the royal lineage—foreshadowing Moses’s exclusion from the promised land following his own transgression in next week’s parshah, Chukat—it also implicitly affirms the arrogant view Korach attributes to Moses: the belief that Moses is not really one of the congregation, that he indeed stands apart from and even “above” it.

Thus, as the midrash complicates our understanding of the parshah it purports to explain, so the parshah in turn subverts the midrash. The friction between the parable and its scriptural application sends us back to the Rabbis with a more critical perspective. Why can the king not resolve matters with his son directly? How has the son “offended” the king? We are not told. We may wonder, though, whether the son didn’t act out of frustration stoked by the favor shown by his father to a friend from outside the family. Is it possible that the son was not really in the wrong? And why is the friend so afraid of the king? By imbuing this minimally sketched royal court with unexpressed tension and intrigue—it is “fraught with background,” as Auerbach famously characterized Biblical narrative—the sages who aim to interpret the Torah may simultaneously be relating their own uneasiness upon reading a parshah which nevertheless remains, like the king in the parable, authoritative.

Samuel P. Catlin is assistant professor of religious studies at Trinity College. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.