By Dave Kay
Last week a generation of Israelites in their younger and more vulnerable years received the unfortunate news that they wouldn’t be entering the land of milk and honey. Just out of reach, the Promised Land recedes before them as they’re sent to wander, camels against the sand, borne back ceaselessly into the desert.
This week in the Book of Numbers parshat Korach depicts the Israelites’ disappointment as it turns quickly from frustration into resentment. Korach, Moses and Aaron’s first cousin, along with Dathan and Abriam (Israelite bros) accumulate a following of skeptics from amongst the Israelites and voice their dissatisfaction over the magnitude of Moses and Aaron’s power. God isn’t pleased with Korach and his followers’ questioning and threatens to kill them. Moses reasons on his people’s behalf, "O God…if one man sins, shall You be angry with the whole congregation" (Numbers 16:22)? God is momentarily halted but eventually opens the earth, swallowing Korach, Dathan, and Abriam. God then lights their 250 followers on fire. Classic. The next day the entire congregation of Israelites blame Moses and Aaron for the mass casualties, this upsets God who incites a plague upon the chosen people.
Parshat Korach is full of great stuff to dissect — the frustration of the Israelite people, Moses and Aaron caught between loyalty to the Israelites and to God, God’s violent reactions, Moses continuously falling on his face — but I don’t have enough time to get to everything. I highly recommend reading the actual text and summaries. What I want to focus on is how hard Moses and Aaron have the Israelite’s back even though the major conflict in the parshah is spurred by their unrest.
Moses and Aaron are told by God to distance themselves from the Israelites twice in the parshah. Both times God is about to punish the Israelites, but first warns the brothers to, “Dissociate yourselves from this
congregation” and, “Stand aside from this congregation” (Numbers 16:21, 17:10). But for some reason, they (Aaron specifically) stand with the Israelites when they’re most vulnerable. As Rachel Farbiarz puts it, “Moses and Aaron did not try to save themselves—as God had commanded—but rather assumed the defense of a nation that had just rejected them.”
This is a pretty righteous and epic move on the bros part. The text doesn’t explain exactly what causes Moses and Aaron to sympathize with their people in the midst of their conflict. Maybe it was the shear aggression of God that rubbed them the wrong way, maybe they felt that they had come so far that to see them wiped out over something like this would be an anticlimactic ending to their journey. Regardless, the idea of sticking with those with whom you share a common goal even when things get tense is something worth thinking about as we journey into the summer together.
At machaneh tensions arise all the time. Members of tzevet chanichim get frustrated with members of mazkirut (and vise versa), madatz madrichim feel isolated from tzevet chanichim (and vise versa), and no one really understands what’s going on in the mitbach. Everyone cares about the success of the summer, but sometimes the inherent differences in our tafkidim make that difficult to remember. Moses and Aaron wanted the same thing as the rest of the Israelites (to make it into the land of Israel and go to Ultrasound), and Moses and Aaron were able to realize that and look past their frustrations in order to preserve that