Koraḥ קרח
The rebellion of Korah that dominates this parasha was the most devastating challenge to Moses’ leadership. As Nahmanides points out, it could only have happened after the sin of the spies and the subsequent condemnation of the generation who left Egypt, told that they would not live to enter the land. Building on their unrest and shattered hopes, Korah assembled a heterogeneous group of malcontents – some from his own tribe, some from that of Reuben, yet others who had leadership positions elsewhere – and challenged the leadership of Moses and Aaron.
The rebellion failed – ended by the ground opening and swallowing the chief rebels – yet the complaints of the people continued. They ended only when Aaron’s rod, alone among the rods for each tribe, budded, blossomed, and brought forth almonds, a paradigm of peaceful conflict resolution. The parasha ends with a legal section detailing the duties of the priests and Levites and the offerings to be given to them by the rest of the people.
The Korah revolt was the most fraught and devastating assault on Moses and Aaron’s leadership. For that reason, most of the essays are focused on it and the way it was understood within the rabbinic tradition. The first explains how Korah misunderstood the nature of spiritual leadership, thinking it to be a matter of status rather than service. The second looks at how rabbinic Midrash understood the revolt. The third examines the rabbinic understanding of argument in general. The fourth looks at the psychology of Moses’ response to the crisis. The fifth contrasts Moses’ reaction here to his very different response to the prophecy of Eldad and Medad. The sixth asks whether Korah was right or wrong to say, “All the congregation are holy.”
Servant Leadership
The Korah rebellion, the most serious of the many challenges to Moses’ leadership, was a complex affair. As the commentators point out, there was not one party to the rebellion but three, each with its own grievance.
First, there was Korah himself. The genealogy given in the opening verse of the parasha – “Korah, son of Yitzhar, son of Kehat, son of Levi” – suggested to the sages the nature of his discontent:
My father was one of four brothers…Amram was the firstborn. Of his sons, Aaron was awarded the priesthood and Moses was given kingship. Who is worthy of receiving the next honour if not the second [brother, Yitzhar]? I, Yitzhar’s son, should have been made prince of the clan, but instead Moses appointed Elizaphan, son of Uziel [the fourth and youngest brother]. Should the youngest of father’s brothers be greater than I? I will dispute with him and undo whatever he does.1Numbers Rabba 18:2.
Korah was aggrieved that he had been passed over when leaders were appointed for the various clans. In Numbers 3:30 we read that “the leader of the families of the clans of Kehat was Elizaphan, son of Uziel.” Elizaphan was the youngest of the four sons of Kehat. Korah was the son of Yitzhar, the second eldest of the brothers. Having already felt slighted that his father’s elder brother, Amram, had provided the Israelites with their two supreme leaders, Moses and Aaron, this further rejection was the final insult. He felt humiliated, and was determined to bring Moses and Aaron down.
Frustrated ambition lay behind the involvement of two other groups as well, the Reubenites and the 250 “leaders” from the other tribes. Here is the analysis of Rabbi Meir Loeb ben Yechiel Michel, Malbim (Romania, 1809–1879):
The grievance [of Datan and Aviram and On ben Pelet] lay in the fact that they belonged to the tribe of Reuben who, as the firstborn son of Jacob, was entitled to the highest offices of spiritual and political leadership. Instead, they complained, the priesthood and divine service had been given to the tribe of Levi and leadership of the tribes to Judah and Joseph.
Similarly, the 250 men contended that, as “princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown,” they should have been accorded the priesthood. They were against conferring a hereditary title on a tribe, but asserted that individual prestige and distinction should be considered. Ibn Ezra suggests that these 250 rebels were in fact firstborns who considered that the priesthood was their natural prerogative. (Commentary to Num. 16:1)
Reuben was Jacob’s firstborn, yet his tribe was systematically passed over when it came to leadership roles, leaving its members with a sense of grievance. In the case of the firstborn of other tribes and families, there was a different resentment, namely that after the sin of the Golden Calf the office of priesthood had been taken from the firstborn and passed to the priests of the tribe of Levi.
In short, each of the three groups was motivated by malice and envy towards the two men, Moses and Aaron, who seemed to have arrogated leadership to themselves and their tribe. The complaints were different and could not all be satisfied. Indeed, had any of them been acceded to they would merely have generated new complaints in turn. What united them – as happens so often in the strange bedfellow alliances between disaffected groups – was less a shared vision of the future than discontent about the present.
The precise details of the narrative are complex, but one thing is luminously clear – the accusation the rebels made against Moses and Aaron:
They came as a group to oppose Moses and Aaron and said to them, “You have gone too far! All the congregation are holy and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you set yourselves above [titnasu] the Lord’s assembly?” (Num. 16:3)
Two of the rebels, Datan and Aviram, went further: “Is it not enough that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the wilderness? And now you also want to lord it [tistarer] over us?” (Num. 16:13). On the face of it, there was compelling logic to their claim. God had called on all Israel to become “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6), meaning a kingdom each of whose members is a priest, a nation all of whose citizens are holy. Why then should there be a cadre of priests and one high priest?
The military hero Gideon said, in the later era of the judges, “I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. The Lord will rule over you” (Judges 8:23). Why then should there be a single life-appointed Moses-type leader? Why should it not be like the days of the judges, charismatic figures who led the people through a particular crisis and then went back to their previous anonymity, as Caleb did during the lifetime of Moses? Surely the people needed no other leader than God Himself.
Later still, Samuel warned the people of the dangers of appointing a king.
He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots…. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves…. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day. (I Sam. 8:11–18)
This is the biblical anticipation of Lord Acton’s famous remark that all power tends to corrupt. Why then give individuals the power Moses and Aaron in their different ways seemed to have?
What did the rebels get wrong? The answer lies in Korah’s claim that Moses and Aaron were setting themselves “above” the people, and in Datan and Aviram’s remark that Moses was “lording it.” The rebels saw leadership in terms of status. A leader is one higher than the rest: the alpha male, the top dog, the ruler, commander, superior, controller, the one before whom people prostrate themselves and to whom others defer. That is what leaders are in hierarchical societies.
But that is not what leadership is in the Torah, and we have had many hints of it already. Of Moses it says that he “was very humble, more so than anyone else on the face of the earth” (Num. 12:3). Of Aaron and the priests, in their capacity as those who blessed the people, it says, “So they will put My name on the Israelites, and I will bless them” (Num. 6:27). In other words, the priests were mere vehicles through which the divine force flowed. Neither priest nor prophet had personal power or authority. They were transmitters of a word not their own. The prophet spoke the word of God for this time. The priest spoke the word of God for all time. But neither was author of the word. That is why humility was not an accident of their personalities but the essence of their role.
Even the slightest hint that they were exercising their own authority, speaking their own word, or doing their own deed immediately invalidated them. That, in fact, is what sealed the fate of Moses and Aaron later, when the people complained and they said, “Listen, you rebels, shall we bring you water out of this rock?” (Num. 20:10). There are many interpretations of what went wrong on that occasion but one, undeniably, is that they attributed the action to themselves rather than God (Ḥizkuni [Hezekiah ben Manoah; France, thirteenth century] to Num. 20:10).
Even a king in Jewish law – the office that is about honour and status – is commanded to be humble. He is to carry a Torah scroll with him and read it all the days of his life “so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites.”2Deut. 17:19–20. Also see Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 2:6.
In Judaism, a leader is not one who holds himself higher than those he or she leads. That is a moral failing, not a mark of stature. The absence of hierarchy does not mean the absence of leadership. A leader is one who coordinates, giving structure and shape to the enterprise, making sure that everyone is following the same script, travelling in the same direction, acting as an ensemble rather than a collection of prima donnas.
A leader must have a vision and communicate it. At times he has to impose discipline. Without leadership even the most glittering array of talents produces not music but noise. That is not unknown in Jewish life, then and now. “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6; 21:25). That is what happens when there is no leadership.
The Torah, and Tanakh as a whole, has a memorable way of putting this. Moses’ highest honour is that he is called eved Hashem, “the servant of God.” He is called this once on his death (Deut. 34:5) and no less than eighteen times in Tanakh as a whole. God calls Abraham, and later Caleb, “My servant” (Gen. 26:24; Num. 14:24). Joshua is twice called “the servant of God” (Josh. 24:29; Judges 2:8). In Judaism, a leader is a servant and to lead is to serve. Anything else is not leadership as Judaism understands it.
Note that we are all God’s servants. The Torah says so: “To Me the Israelites are servants; they are My servants whom I brought out of Egypt” (Lev. 25:55). So it is not that Moses was a different kind of being than we are all called on to be. It is that he epitomised it to the utmost degree. The less there is of self in one who serves God, the more there is of God. Moses was the supreme exemplar of R. Yoḥanan’s principle, that “where you find humility, there you find greatness.”3Midrash Lekaḥ Tov, Ekev, 15a.
This principle turned out to be fateful to the history of Israel because of one specific event. Towards the end of the reign of King Solomon, the people grew restless at the burden he had placed on them, in part because of the building of the Temple. When the king died, the people formed a delegation – led by an ambitious would-be leader, Jeroboam – to Solomon’s son Rehoboam. They had a simple and specific demand: “Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but now lighten the harsh labour and the heavy yoke he put on us, and we will serve you” (I Kings 12:4). Rehoboam told them to come back in three days’ time and he would give them an answer. He then went to the elders who had been his father’s counsellors. “What would you advise me to say?” he asked (12:6). Their answer is fascinating: “If today you will be a servant [eved] to these people and serve them [vaavad’tem] and give them a favourable answer, they will always be your servants [avadim]” (12:7).
The task of a king, they said, is to serve the people, not to impose burdens on them. It was wise advice. Unfortunately, Rehoboam – young, impetuous – ignored it. Instead he asked his friends, with whom he had grown up. Their advice was the opposite. In effect, they said: Show them who is boss. Tell them, “My little finger is thicker than my father’s waist. My father laid on you a heavy yoke; I will make it even heavier. My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions” (I Kings 12:10–11).
Rehoboam did so. The result was predictable. The majority of the people followed Jeroboam. The kingdom split in two. It was the beginning of the end of the first commonwealth. Authoritarian leadership – in which the leader sets himself above and lords it over the people – has never been acceptable in Israel.
There is an important concept popularised by Robert K. Greenleaf (1904-1990),4Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership (New York: Paulist Press, 2002). namely “servant leadership.” His view, inspired by a Hermann Hesse novel with Buddhist undertones, was that a leader is the servant of those he leads. Judaism has its own and somewhat different version of servant leadership, namely that the leader is the servant of God, not of the people; but neither is he their master. Only God is that. The leader is not “above” the people: he and they are equal. Rather, he is their teacher, guide, advocate, and defender. His task is to remind them endlessly of their vocation and inspire them to be true to it.
In Judaism, leadership is not about popularity: “If a scholar is loved by the people of his town, it is not because he is gifted but because he fails to rebuke them in matters of heaven” (Ketubbot 105b). Nor is a true leader eager for the job. Almost without exception, the great leaders of Tanakh were reluctant to assume the mantle of leadership. Rabban Gamliel summed it up when he said to two sages he wanted to appoint to office: “Do you imagine I am offering you rulership? I am offering you avdut, the chance to serve” (Horayot 10a–b).
A true leader is a servant, not a master. He does not seek to set himself above others or lord it over them. Leadership as power, dominance, mastery, or rule has no place in Judaism. To the contrary, the greatest achievement of a leader is to have served God and helped others to do so. That is what Moses understood, and what Korah and his fellow rebels did not.