Parashat Korah

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Not One Donkey of Yours Did I Take.

 Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan

l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai

This statement of Moshe’s is conventionally understood as claiming that he is above suspicion – that he has never exploited his ruling status for his own personal interests.

Hazal  expand the complaints of the Jewish people to include elements of utter ingratitude toward Moshe their Redeemer and savior from the house of bondage:

“They suspected him regarding their wives.”  To such an extent had these ingrates deteriorated.

Then how does Moshe’s statement help matters?  “Not one donkey of yours did I take.”  Their claims did not derive from Moshe’s behavior, but were rather intrinsically unsound and unfounded, deriving from a different motive entirely.  We cannot even guess or imagine how they justified such vicious accusations.

For this reason, it appears that Moshe’s claim was not in order to justify himself, but rather as reproof to them.  Moshe beats his own breast and takes the fact of their brazen insolence upon himself in order lilamed zchut, to justify them and to defend their behavior, hoping to avert God’s fury thereby.

For if their claim would have been understood in its plain meaning, it would have been construed as absolute ingratitude, making their imminent and absolute destruction inevitable.

Moshe therefore claims that he has not been adequately forceful.  He has been overly lenient, and has therefore been the cause of their deterioration, to the point that they now belittle the principle of authority: Had Moshe educated them to respect and revere authority, they would never have become so brazen.

In support of this claim, it appears that Korah and his group, who were chiefs of the tribes, rejected Moshe’s authority specifically because they enjoyed too much good, for they had every manner of abundant good – in excess. 

Had their character been educated to revere authority, this would have limited their ability to rebel.  From here we see that Moshe’s claim points to a new principle: The need for balance between the individual and the group.  On the one hand, the threat is constantly hovering, that the group will devour and eliminate the individual – just as any strong threatens any weak, for the majority is stronger than the individual and holds the instruments of government in its hand: Bureaucracy, the rule of the law, the police, the military, etc.

Yet on the other hand, the possiblity exists that an individual dictator will seize control over the public, and view its sole purpose as being the actualization of his own dictatorial ambitions.

Moshe points to these two extremes, and brings as evidence the fact that indeed it would have contributed greatly to the state of balance if he had exploited his ruling position even slightly, to levy taxes from them, and to give them the taste of the limits set for them by authority, and that this would have been entirely justifiable on his part for after all, everything he had done, troubled and toiled, he had only done, troubled, and toiled for their sake – and it would be only fitting they they pay out of their own pockets for the immense service he has performed for them.

“A doctor that charges nothing, is worth nothing,” is the Gemara’s famous proverb.  One does not know how to appreciate what one receives free of charge.

We learn an additional lesson from this: There is absolutely no chance that balance between individual and group will come into being unless there is the intermediate stage of ben adam lahavero, interpersonal relations – one individual to another – based on a foundation of reciprocity.

This intermediate stage is what gives crystallized form and solidity to that three-phased structure that is individual/group relations.  Only after one is solidly established at the stage of “love your comrade as yourself”, can one grow – by an organic developmental process – into the next stage of “do not separate yourself from the group.” 

This stage is a mine-strewn one: Dichotomy reigns between the individual and the group.  The menace of this dichotomy is that it presents individual/group relations as being mutually opposed and mutually threatening.

This gives us an interesting angle by which to view the Korah phenomenon Korah phenomenon: Korah represented the intermediate stage, which had not yet existed in the unfolding structure of this newly-born nation.

Moshe represented the supreme authority.  Aharon whas the one who applied the authority in practice and brought it down to the level of the people.  This authority had been inadequate, as mentioned earlier, and therefore the people stumbled into sin with Aharon, with the Golden Calf, because he represented authority while never emphasizing it, to such an extent that the people received the impression that a contradictory relationship existed here, apparently originating in a more fundamental contradiction between the government (Moshe and Aharon) and the individual, whom they attempt to control.

Thus the people rose up and made the Calf, as the symbol of an authority that was not tangible, because they were lacking in understanding of the concept of an authority that is genuine, due to the excessive humility that characterized Moshe and Aharon.

Similarly Korah, “who was clever”, took up the banner of the individual, representing individual rights, and set it up as a conflict, as existing in opposition to government, as a mutually threatening dichotomy.  Korah, in his shrewd cunning, exploited the nation’s inexperience, their lack of the intermediate stage, which made it so easy to present government to them as being an entity that threatens the individual.

Moshe, by his claim that “not one donkey of yours did I take” was pointing to the lack of an authoritative structure.  Yet he drew the correct conclusion regarding the lack of the intermediate stage of the authoritative structure, and therefore asked of God that He create a new creation, in which the earth would swallow them up, in order to teach them the lesson that one is unable to brazenly confront authority if one lacks solid ground beneath one’s feet: It is only on the basis of reciprocity, on the basis of “love your comrade as yourself” that one can justify a demand for individual rights. 

One justifies the existence of “as yourself” by recognizing and granting hesed to the existence and the rights of others, and only on this condition do I grant myself too the right to exist, for after all, if the other has no right to exist, from where do I take my right to exist?  It can only be that the group grants me this right, by virtue of my being a quantitative unit, absorbed in the genral group.  However, the right of the individual to exist as an individual, can only be based on a foundation of reciprocity.

An individual’s rights are not self-evident, when speaking of an individual who is not sufficiently mature, who is incapable of consolidating an objective self-image, freed of the subjective, egocentric point of view.

Here we should point out that the phenomenon of the child who believes that the moon follows him wherever he goes is an illusion that cannot dispelled until the child comes into conflict with another child who believes that the moon follows him wherever he goes, and they are forced to compare their experiences.  It is only after such a confrontation that a child attains objective understanding.

To the extent that a private individual lacks personal maturity, he is in need of the intervention of authority, to establish authoritative guidelines by which he must behave.

This point helps us to understand the blossoming staff of Aharon: A supreme intervention, designed to establish clearly in their minds who has been chosen to take the lead and to assume greatness.

We should point out that from the view of the absolute, an individual’s mere being is inadequate to assist him in deciding and determining, on his own paltry powers, matters of ultimate consequence.  Therefore one cannot do without the intervention of the dimension of height, for the reason just mentioned:

The stage of personal maturity, which is merely an intermediate stage, cannot be depended upon, for it continues toward the third stage that requires new clarifications and creates new situations and new problems of conflict and threat between the individual and the group.

A further reason is that the further stage contains an element that is entirely new: There is a new way of seeing reality – from the point of view of the group.  Considerations of hashgaha, Divine Providence, the Divine calculation, a new and different form of siyata dishmaya, Heavenly assistance, which the private individual has no part in and no right to.

This explains the people’s charge that “you have killed God’s people”, meaning, the nation had difficulty as individuals in understanding the third stage of the group.  They viewed the group as a mere collection of individuals, containing nothing more than whatever is contained in the individual.  They could not see any reason to punish an individual for not accepting the yoke of the group upon himself.

The ketoret, the Temple incense that Aharon placed between the living and the dead in order to halt the plague, came to teach them that a divider exists between the group and the individual.  The creation of a group is not the same thing as a proliferation of individuals, but rather, it is a new reality.  This reality merits Heavenly assistance in a way that a private individual can never merit it.  If a private individual dares to offer ketoret, in his own name and not as messenger of the people, he loses his right to exist as an individual.  Therefore, those who had offered incense were punished, whereas Aharon was not punished for offering incense, because he had done so as a messenger of the people.

Why ketoret specifically?  Ketoret is the symbol of perfect harmony formed of individual components.  One may never make it or offer it in its unique composition, even after one has been privileged as an individual to free oneself from the subjective viewpoint of egoism based upon self-preservation.

See end of Parashat Beha’alotcha comments regarding the reciprocity between Moshe and the Creator, which Moshe attained in merit of his humility.  It was this reciprocity which stood Moshe in good stead in his conflict with Korah who represented the total opposity: An arrogance that causes the conflict that detaches, as opposed to the conflict that connects, that liberates from ego and exposes the creative self of the child comparing with the creative self of his friend, to get to the bottom of the question of who the moon is really following.  Conflict out of arrogance detaches one from one’s basis of existence.  (The earth loses its role as the foundation upon which existence itself leans.)

The red heifer returns the earth to its role as the foundation of existence, on condition that one accepts the Godly law, in spite of its lack of logical premise – an element that constitutes an important condition for man’s relating to reality. 

Giving up this condition, the need for logical premise, is a counterweight to Korah’s “logical” cleverness.  The absurdity of the huka, the incomprehensible law of the heifer pulls out the ground based on natural human existence and places a Godly ground base in its place.

http://english.sadnatenosh.com/dload/06/shlah.htm