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Parshat Korah

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“CUNNING MEN DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD”

Moshe Rabeinu’s response to Korah seems so out of character. Faithful shepherd, humblest of men, his hallmark is giving in. When has he ever stood on the issue of his own honor? When has he ever insisted on the reverence so overwhelmingly due, so rarely bestowed?

Was it so bad, what Korah did? Well, obviously, yes. But what was it exactly? What was its root and cause?

Korah’s problem was not naiveté, as we explained in the problem of the meraglim: The spies really were naïve. Gobbling up their information raw, they leap at hasty, injudicious conclusions. They never filter, chew, digest, etc. They never trouble to check things out, to investigate. What they perceive is never subject to interpretation. Everything is just as it seems; face value equals final decision.

It is a real error, and a costly one: “Weeping for generations.” The naïve person’s pitfall, he falls right into the trap – set especially for people like him – called panic.

Panic causes flight, and retreat, and rout. It precludes the possibility of confronting an issue intelligently and responsibly. The meraglim witnessed their enemies participating in what was obviously a mass funeral. Huge mobs were paying their respects to a triple septuagenarian. Had they troubled to ask a few questions, they would have discovered that the reason for such mass involvement was precisely because a death was such a rare phenomenon. Instead, the meraglim panicked at the sight of everyone involved in burying the dead. The whole population seemed to be members of a huge universal hevra kadisha; it must be truly “a land that devours its inhabitants.”

Despite all the spiritual dangers that lie in ambush for naïve people, a cure does exist for naiveté: Faith in God, of the perpetual kind, cures naiveté.

There are two kinds of faith in God.

One is a belief in God’s hidden involvement. It is the belief that God’s unseen presence is what gives life its deeper and higher dimensions. All phenomena, all that transpires – anything that ever happens to anybody – contains Godly meanings, intentions and goals. Every occurrence is a phase in the Godly process. Not the slightest particle of any event is devoid of Divine intention.

Then there is faith in God of the rare kind. It is a belief in the possibility of Godly intervention, in situations that seem hopeless. “…Though a sharp sword may be laid against a man’s neck…” his faith keeps him from despair, because he believes that “many messengers are available to God.” It is a belief in miracles.

There are certain extreme attitudes that preclude faith: One is an insistence on the quick snapshot approach to existence. This is the person who takes quick sketches, quick impressions of his life situations. He snaps the photograph ‘in-situ,’ catches reality’s most obvious, most external elements, and draws his conclusions from these. He looks no further, and certainly no deeper. Depth of meaning does not excite him, nor does imbuing routine events with an awareness of Godly purpose. However, an extreme deviation from routine does interest him. Spectacular miracles do rivet his attention. He will not attempt to reject or disprove the phenomenon of a miracle. (It is too much trouble.) The obviousness of the miracle will persuade him. He will not try to pooh-pooh it; he will not rationalize or analyze it away. He has no inherently evil tendencies. When a miracle stares him in the face, his dominant character feature – snapping quick impressions of life – actually works in his favor. If the miracle is blatant enough, and glaringly obvious to the eye, and it openly invites wonder and astonishment, then the naïve person will henceforth, from that moment onward, believe wholeheartedly in the power of miracles.

Not so the other extreme attitude, however. The other extreme attitude, that precludes faith, is immune to miracles. This attitude is characterized by cunning, as implied in “the snake was far shrewder than any other…” A snake, that is to say a person whose relationship to his fellow human beings is defined by shrewdness and cunning, will never find faith blocking his path. The road is clear, and wide open to his destructive aspirations. The most obvious miracle, the most drastic deviation from routine, the wildest upheaval of natural law – he will deny. Do not bother him with facts. He is never disconcerted, and never impressed. He has one motivation: self-interest. It does not appear that way, however. It appears that he is wonderfully calm, logical, dependable, and responsible – in short – there is someone wonderfully reasonable to talk to. He seems to be the only intelligent person in a crowd of simpletons. The other people are hopelessly gullible, readily exploited, easy prey for any smooth talking charlatan.

The shrewd are never impressed by the Godly presence. They stand no chance of being impressed for they are well protected from Godliness by their perpetually cunning calculations against their fellow human beings.

Cunning people foment dispute. Divide and conquer, yet they are never perceived as divisive, but rather as seekers of the common good. In fact, what they seek is machloket, for it serves their self-interest. Tragically, this phenomenon exists in our own midst, and in our innermost circles, and it is the cause of countless Jewish sorrows. As Rav Haim Brisker responded, when someone suggested he might take advantage of a train stop in Kovno to deliver a lecture at a certain yeshiva: “Some of them say over there that Reb Haim does not know how to learn, but they would have a hard time swearing to it. If I would lecture there, they would be able to swear to it.”

This means that an opinion derived from machloket and hatred is not impressed by reality-based facts. It draws its conclusions out of its own pre-conceived notions. A shrewd man has no faith in facts and no faith in God. Being devoid of faith, he is devoid of the dimensions of height and depth. A two-dimensional being, his vision includes himself and nothing more; his is a purely egocentric perspective. He hates all men, they are all his enemies. They all endanger his existence by their very presence.

Moshe Rabeinu tests out the Korah phenomenon. The carefully discerning eye of the great leader observes from a distance as events unfold: Perhaps it is a positive phenomenon? Perhaps Korah is an idealist, too careless perhaps of the boundaries of courtesy, but deeply sensitive to social justice?

Moshe Rabeinu puts Korah through personality tests, watching for any positive or honest response. He gives him room to respond with dignity, to retract without losing face. He allows him to come down honorably from the high tree of “social justice” and “political logic” and “humanistic wisdom” that he has perhaps too recklessly climbed.

Only when it has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that Korah finds no joy in the opportunity for repentance offered him by Moshe, that the sense of justice by which he claimed he had been moved, and by which he had seduced all his naïve and gullible accomplices has been a mere tactic, only then does Moshe Rabeinu alter his approach – completely.

He perceives that the obligation now falls upon him to eradicate this phenomenon, to uproot it, for the simple reason that it was in the process of destroying itself. It, in itself, was incapable of continuing its own existence.

The punishment that Moshe requests of the Creator is educational in nature, an object lesson for all who love discord: Ba’alei machloket – those who possess and are possessed by the desire for divisiveness – can literally lose the ground beneath their feet. They can deteriorate without limit, unto the nethermost pit of hell. There are no boundaries at which they stop, no red lines that they may not cross. The ground beneath their feet does not contain them. After all, what could be more convincing? Is there a clearer, more substantial proof than the ground beneath one’s feet?

“If the Creator shall create a new creation” demonstrating what would really happen if Korah’s denial of tangible truth would actually come true, would actually turn into a tangible reality, then witnesses will be astonished by a new realization. They will discover that wickedness – that brazen denial of truth and insistence upon machloket – has its own limitations.

And indeed, they were swallowed alive into the pit. There they were persuaded of the truth, and there they proclaim it, to this day: “Moshe emet…Moshe is truth and his Torah is truth…” Meaning, reality is given to laws and limitations that are prescribed on high. There is a Master, and reality is His tangible presence.

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