Legends of Korah
Who doesn't love a rebel?
I read scripture for the villains, and I’m far from the only one. Bible villains are badass. They’re defying the most powerful force in the world, and they’re doing it with style. “The bricks have fallen down, but we will rebuild with dressed stone; the fig trees have been felled, but we will replace them with cedars.” All the races of man, coming together to build the Tower of Babel. Iron chariots, which from context seem to be time-traveling tanks that allow you to defy prophecy itself. Cain, who somehow negotiates a punishment for murder that includes freedom, immortality, and a mystical symbol protecting him from harm.
Most of them are acting out of orneriness, or a desire to not be conquered and enslaved, which often amounts to the same thing in the Bible. Korah’s my favorite because he’s acting out of principle.
Korah in the Torah
Korah doesn’t get a lot of background in the original story. We get lots of generations of his ancestry, of course, gotta have the begats. But nothing meaty in the biography—we just jump straight to the conflict.
Moses has appointed his brother as High Priest, and other relatives for some other positions. Also, he promised to lead his people to a land of milk and honey, and they are not there. Egypt has started to look like paradise by comparison. He’s started to enforce some weird commandments; he just had a man executed for working on a Saturday. Korah gathers some supporters and confronts him.
And they rose up before Moses, with certain of the children of Israel, two hundred and fifty princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown:
And they gathered themselves together against Moses and against Aaron, and said unto them, Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them: wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the Lord?
“All the congregation are holy, every one of them.” Villains get the best lines.
His allies then give their own grievances, which center around the whole thing where they’re wandering in the desert and it feels like Moses overpromised and underdelivered.
Moses is angry, but still tries to win them over. Communication breaks down a bit after the rebels are too paranoid to go to one of Moses’s meetings, thinking that it’s a trap, and Moses is too proud to go to their turf. Eventually they all manage to meet in one spot: just outside the door to the tabernacle. Then, the Lord speaks to Moses and Aaron telepathically. “Get out of the way so I can smite all these people real quick,” He says (translation mine, but it’s pretty literal). Moses and Aaron are not into this plan. Instead, they fall on their faces and beg for mercy for their enemies. The Lord relents and allows them to evacuate most of them. Then the earth cracks open and swallows Korah, the other organizers, and their families. While everybody is fleeing in panic, the 250 men who were in the first meeting also get consumed in fire. Only Korah’s children survive.
Martyring Korah does not calm things down. Thousands more join the movement in outrage at his death. “Get out of the way so I can smite all these people real quick,” saith the Lord again. Moses stalls while sending Aaron around to persuade as many of them as possible to repent and atone. Still, the Lord sends a plague, and 14,700 more people get added to the body count.
At which point the rebels, understandably, decide to lie low for a couple of chapters, until the Waters of Meribah incident.
Korah in Commentary
Rabbinical literature (the Talmud and such) adds in some backstory. Korah was fabulously wealthy. While a slave in Egypt, he found one of three treasures that Joseph hid during his time as right-hand-man to the pharaoh. He got so rich that when fleeing Egypt, it took 300 mules just to carry the keys to all his treasure chests. (The second treasure was found by the Roman Empire. The third hasn’t been found yet, so get digging).
Korah also had the ability to see the future, in bits and pieces. He knew that he would have many descendants, some of whom would also be able to see the future, such as Samuel the Seer. This gave him a false sense of security from divine wrath, because sons are usually punished for the sins of their fathers.
He was a wise and influential man. Commentary glosses his name as deriving from a word for baldness, because his loss to the community was like ripping the hair off someone’s head.
They also give him a Lady Macbeth wife, who comes up with all of the anti-Moses arguments that Korah later repeats. Using an idiom that we share, she tells him to “stop letting Moses treat you like shit.” This is not quite a “women are the source of all evil” story because they also say that some people were argued out of rebelling by their wives. But it’s still basically that—they’re trying to excuse Korah by giving his wife all the agency.
So he’s a tragic figure, who makes some seemingly good points. The commentary expands a bit on his (and/or his wife’s) list of grievances:
Egalitarianism vs. Nepotism: Moses keeps giving priest jobs to his incompetent relatives. This is bad because it entitles them to collect tithes from everyone else, so Moses’s family is going to end up dominating everyone else.
Anarchism vs. Authoritarianism: Why do we even need priests? The passage Quakers use to justify their lack of priests comes from Korah’s line above. They gloss it as “there is that of God in everyone.” Instead of a hereditary line of high priests, the commentary has Korah say, we should “let power make the rounds to everyone.” There is a theocracy emerging here. Moses is a good man, but what about the next generation? We just escaped from a theocracy in Egypt, where a single ruler claimed a divine right to absolute authority. We know where this road leads.
Cynicism vs. Idealism: Moses claims to have received perfect, universal moral law. But the laws themselves are just so…specific. Moses’s most recent revelation was that we need to make new prayer shawls with four blue threads in specific places. We already have plenty of blue clothes, which contain far more than four blue threads, but no, universal moral law says those don’t count. Some commentary has the protesters all wearing blue to symbolize this point. He’s told us we need to take one verse from the Torah and put it in a mezuzah on all of our doorframes. If one verse makes a house holy, what about all the copies of the Torah in the houses? They have that verse in them, as well as the context for it.
This is all very suspect. It’s clearly coming from a human, with a limited human perspective, not an all-knowing supreme being.
Moses’s counterarguments:
In Defense of Nepotism: Power shouldn’t go to those who desire it. Aaron objected to being named High Priest, on grounds of incompetence, so paradoxically that makes him a good choice. And it wasn’t really a choice, anyway, it was divine will.
In Defense of Authoritarianism: You’re conveniently skipping past how we escaped from Egypt. It wasn’t through collective action. It was me, or, more properly speaking, the Lord acting through me. Don’t treat that like it’s nothing. Moses wisely stops short of claiming that he makes the trains run on time, because he knows he isn’t right now (Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time, either, he just made it illegal to say they weren’t). But we, the readers, know that Moses is eventually going to succeed.
In Defense of Idealism: My claims to absolute truth are very empirically testable! Try it! Try worshipping in a slightly different way from how I say to. See what happens. You won’t like it.
These rabbis first build Korah up so that he’ll make a bigger impact when he falls. If he made bad arguments, the lesson would be “listen to whoever makes the better argument.” If he were a nobody, the lesson would be “listen to whoever’s most famous.” But if he’s a rich and wise leader, making some really good points, the lesson ends up being “listen to your rabbi.” No matter how well someone else argues against them, obey your appointed authorities. A later commentary on these commentaries says that Korah’s treasure isn’t literal, it’s a metaphor for this valuable lesson in trust and obedience. (The Roman Empire finding the other treasure is a metaphor for how we also need to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Presumably the third one represents some as-yet-undiscovered reason to submit to authority.)
“Don’t listen to people who make compelling arguments” is, to put it mildly, not modern diaspora Jewish culture. It’s not even the internal culture of the people writing the commentary, who are constantly arguing against each other. It’s the culture an entrenched power structure wants to impose on the people at the bottom.
Lenny Bruce had a famous bit where he contrasted “Jewish” and “goyish” (non-Jewish) culture. Fruit salad is Jewish, lime jello is goyish. It’s mostly about what being in the minority does for you. All Black people are Jewish, he says, especially the jazz singers. Maleness and militarism are goyish, femininity and activism are Jewish. New Yorkers are all Jewish, even if they’re goyish. Montanans are all goyish, even if they’re Jewish. B’nai Brith, despite being a Jewish organization, is goyish.
In that vein, I’m pretty tempted to say that rabbis are goyish. Jesus was Jewish, the Christian church is goyish. (That one has the advantage of being literally true, too). Korah is Jewish, Moses is goyish.
Korah in the Quran
The Quran goes all in on the “Korah was rich” idea in the Talmud. Korah was not only wealthy, he used his wealth to tyrannize people. He attributed his finding the treasure to his own merit rather than divine providence, lost his humility, and paid the price.
This interpretation, written well into the diaspora, is an alternative to the awkward conclusion that Korah was more Jewish than Moses. Korah was punching down, not up. Maybe that’s why he gets swallowed up by the earth instead of struck by lightning. Religious movements that start out as contrarian underdogs, as many do, aren’t fond of the “ignore clever arguments” meme. Until they get established, anyway.
Korah in Hasidism
In 1923, the influential Austrian-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber first articulated his own version of Bruce’s fruit salad/lime jello dichotomy—which he called “Ich-du” vs. “Ich-Es.” This is often translated as “I-thou” vs. “I-it.” “I-thou” acknowledges the truth and personhood of the other, and in so doing creates a spiritual unity. “I-it” sees the other as merely an extension of oneself. Paradoxically, this attitude actually separates the I from the It. By treating an object, or an objectified person, as a tool, we ignore its essence and prevent ourselves from actually touching it. Fruit salad is one meal made of many still-identifiable components. Lime jello is an undifferentiated goop that probably never even had actual lime involved.
Buber uses Jesus as a positive example—Jesus is “I-thou.” By treating the Lord as a person (his father, even!) he avoids the trap of seeing himself as the embodiment of divinity. Jesus would rather not be crucified, but he humbly acknowledges it’s not up to him— “Thy will, not mine, be done.” Saint Paul and the rest, by trying to merge God the Father and Jesus the Son into one entity, fall into “I-it” instead.
This framework allows Buber to condemn Korah, and praise Moses, in yet another way. Korah’s entire way of thinking is wrong. Moses isn’t taking power for himself, he isn’t giving power to his relatives. He’s just obeying the Lord, which we’re all free to do. Only in the limited “I-it” mindset does Moses’s spirituality look like tyranny.
Buber’s view of Korah is mostly taken from an earlier Hasidic writer, Polish-Jewish Rebbe Bunim. Bunim saw the struggle between Moses and Korah as a metaphor for the struggle within ourselves, between self-centeredness and world-centeredness. For the world to be redeemed, the eternal Korah must submit to the eternal Moses. Bunim is careful not to deify Moses the man—for Bunim, Moses made mistakes in his handling of the situation. An even-less-self-centered Moses wouldn’t have let communications break down out of frustration and anger. Moses should have been more Moses-like, in other words, which he could have done by not taking the criticisms so personally. Korah, in turn, should have been more Korah-like, following his thoughts further and reaching the conclusion that he should submit to Moses.
Buber quotes Bunim, and then quotes a eulogy given for Bunim: “Rabbi Bunim had the keys to all the firmaments. And why not? A man who does not think of himself is given all the keys.” This feels to me to be in pointed contradiction with the Talmudic version of Korah. Remember, Talmudic Korah had so many keys, it took 300 mules to carry all of them. (Irrelevant, but this is terrible design.) And Talmudic Korah at least claims to not be thinking of himself, but to be treating everyone as equals.
The Talmud laments that he missed the mark and failed to be like Moses. Buber laments that he failed to be Korah. The Talmud, ultimately, is being authoritarian. Buber’s not. As soon as Israel was founded, he pivoted from advocating Zionism to vocally criticizing Israel’s leaders, especially about their treatment of Arabs. David Ben-Gurion was about as close to Moses as a modern-day person could get, and Buber clashed with him often.
I like this evolution in values, although I still can’t help but feel indignant on behalf of Korah. The guy who said that there is that of God in everyone is being dismissed as only in it for himself. The Talmudic version of Korah seems truer to him, for all its hostility.
The Sons of Korah
Korah’s sons were spared, and went on to create the lineage Korah had foreseen. They and their descendants are given as the source at the beginning of many of the psalms, starting with Psalm 42, the lament of an oppressed minority. If you’ve been to a Jewish or Christian service, you’ve probably sung one of the hymns attributed to the Korahites. Korahites are a part of the soul of humanity.
I’ve been saying this parenthetically for a while, but now it’s time to take a deep, shaky breath and say it head on. Diaspora is Jewish. Zionism is goyish. Buber, like many, thought that a Jewish state would embody and promote Jewish values. This was a mistake. A Jewish state, in the sense of Buber’s judaism, Rebbe Bruce’s judaism, or my judaism, does not and cannot exist.
When you’re in power, you see like a state, as the contemporary political scientist James C. Scott wrote. You try to homogenize and simplify your subjects, because you need them to be, as Scott puts it, “legible” in order to interact with them. This is especially brutal with colonized or otherwise subaltern people, because those in power really don’t understand them, and don’t want to. When see you see like a state, you necessarily erase everyone else’s unique wisdom (“metis”), except to the very limited extent they can put it into words. It’s exactly Buber, just translated into politics. States are “I-it”.
I’ve had multiple people say to me “boy, it’s too bad the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity instead of Judaism. Judaism’s such a better model for the kind of pluralism you need in an empire.” This is wrong. The truth is the opposite. If Constantine had converted to Judaism, Judaism would have remained the religion of authoritarianism. Instead, Christianity took that role—but it was much less suited to it than Judaism would’ve been, which is a very good thing. We ended up with an establishment Christianity awkwardly trying to work around its own extremely anti-establishment scripture. As soon as the printing press made it possible for there to be cheap Bibles, and therefore for lay people to read them, they started discovering bits like Matthew 6, where Jesus very clearly states that prayer should be a solitary, personal activity. His sample private prayer begins “Our father who art in heaven…”. It’s the Lord’s Prayer. You know, the thing everybody was chanting in unison in church. And so the world changed. The kings and emperors who had been crowned by the church began to fall.
Meanwhile, Judaism turned into something more like what Jesus actually wanted—because Jews didn’t have power. One notable example of a diaspora-driven shift is that Jews don’t proselytize—that’s not because of the Torah. That was forced on us, and then we came up with rationales for it, and so it became truly part of Judaism.
As soon as Jews start getting power, it does the same thing to us that it does to everyone else. I used to live right near the modern-day Hasidic community in Brooklyn. I would not want to live in it. They ban access to the internet, I hear—you can only access media where all the content has to be approved by a committee of rabbis. They do whatever they can to make it difficult to leave, which is never a good sign. The one time I engaged with one who was trying to convert me, he was immediately bewildered by my unfamiliar position. He had never learned what Jews outside his community believed. We weren’t even able to argue with each other, because he could not understand what I was saying.
The only way to get anything even vaguely approaching a pluralistic state is to build it around an explicitly pluralistic scripture. The Romans had it right the first time, with their ad-hoc polytheistic fruit salad of deities. Come up with a new policy, like “everyone in the city gets free food”? Just add a new god. Conquer people who worship “different gods”? Just add their gods to the pantheon, and now they’re Roman citizens who favor certain Roman gods. Romans had no First Commandment about having to favor any particular god over another. Or they didn’t, until they adopted Christianity.
The United States’s civic religion has pluralism as its First Amendment, which is why we’re one of the very few places in the world where hijabs are neither mandatory nor forbidden. It matters. A lesser-known, but also vitally important, part of our state religion is the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 reassures the government of what is now Libya that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” It was read aloud in the Senate and ratified unanimously. Whenever people tried to oppress American Jews, say, or advocate for wars of religion, by saying “America is a Christian nation,” they could be immediately refuted by this reference to our actual scripture.
Even so, pluralism is always under attack. It has to be, because pluralism extends to non-pluralists. Every generation has to fight its own difficult battle to protect the First Amendment. (These are metaphorical battles. Armies are goyish.) In states with a non-pluralist scripture, these battles aren’t just difficult—they’re doomed. Israel has become the world’s single biggest threat to Jewish values, and that was always going to happen.
It’s also managed to become the world’s single biggest threat to the Jewish people. This too, I think, is inevitable. Institutions that survive will eventually sacrifice their original purpose for the sake of the institution’s survival. Israel’s government, and their allies in ours, do their best to conflate disapproval of the Israeli state’s actions with anti-Semitism. They do this, because they want people to say “oh, well I’m not anti-Semitic, so I must be pro-Israel.” So they must know, and accept, that some people will instead say “oh, well I’m not pro-Israel, so I must be anti-Semitic.” They’re knowingly promoting anti-Semitism in order to serve the state. I’d bet money that there are Mossad agents right now infiltrating activist groups to encourage them to become more anti-Semitic. So like, straight up, that’d be the deliverable in some Israeli civil servant’s job description: promote anti-Semitism.
I’m an American and a Jew, and the values I’ve taken from both lead to me the same conclusion. I am pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian. I am anti-Israel. Israel, as a so-called Jewish state, should be dissolved. No state has a right to exist. They are granted the privilege of existence for as long as they serve their people. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to dissolve the state, it is not just permissible to do so. It is a mitzvah. As long as, as the Declaration of Independence goes on to say, you make a good argument.
Bonus: Korah in Hell
The story of Korah’s punishment must have shaped the way we later came to think of Hell. Korah is swallowed up into the earth, and then all of the original protesters were consumed in fire. Many interpreted that “all” to mean that Korah, too, already beneath the earth, was consumed in fire. Many decided he, and his followers, were still there.
One Babylonian rabbi wrote that he decided to look into it. He asked an Arab to take him to the place where Korah had been swallowed up. The Arab took him to what sounds like a geothermal fissure: two deep rifts in the ground with smoke rising out of them. His unnamed guide lowered down some water, and when he pulled it back up it was gone, and the mechanism was scorched. Both of them thought they could hear distant voices screaming “Moses and his Torah are true, and we are liars!” The Arab said that the rebels bubble up there about once a month, like meat being pushed around by the water in a boiling pot.
There’s always been considerable disagreement about whether he’s there forever. Most, I think, say that he will eventually be allowed to go to Heaven, as almost everybody is. He might already be there, thanks to intercessory prayer from Hannah, one of the prophets descended from Korah.
The Arab lowering down water to the suffering in Hell seems to have been enough of an archetype to draw the ire of Omar Khayyám, an 11th-century Persian known for both his poetry and his mathematical theorems. Khayyám wrote
Oh, Thou who burn'st in Heart for those who burn
In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
How long be crying, “Mercy on them, God!”
Why, who art Thou to teach, and He to learn?
This story is also presumably the basis for a book by William Carlos Williams, the extremely American poet (and practicing doctor). Kora in Hell is an experimental piece of fragmented poetry and confusing prose. I say “presumably” because as near as I can tell, Kora in Hell never comes anywhere close to explaining its title, and Kora also sounds a lot like one of the names of Persephone. It’s probably both? The book was poorly received; he’s better known for his later poems that are quite short and clear—the plums in the icebox, the red wheelbarrow.
I’m pretty sure the right way to quote this book is with a bunch of disconnected fragments, stuck together with no explanation.
I praise those who have the wit and courage, and the conventionality, to go direct toward their vision of perfection in an objective world where the sign-posts are clearly marked, viz., to London. But confine them in hell for their paretic assumption that there is no alternative but their own groove.
I like the boy. It’s years back I began to draw him to me—or he was pushed my way by the others. And what if there’s no sleep because the bed’s burning; is that a reason to send a chap to Greystone! Greystone! There’s a name if you’ve any tatter of mind left in you.
Damn me I feel sorry for them. Yet syphilis is no more than a wild pink in the rock’s cleft. I know that. Radicals and capitalists doing a can-can tread the ground clean. Luck to the feet then. Bring a Russian to put a fringe to the rhythm. What’s the odds? Commiseration cannot solve calculus. Calculus is a stone. Frost’ll crack it. Till then, there’s many a good back-road among the clean raked fields of hell where autumn flowers are blossoming.