Everything is Spiritual
Korach, Jonah, and the Psalm of the Rebel
The LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, “Stand back from this community that I may annihilate them in an instant!” But they fell on their faces and said, “O God, Source of the breath of all flesh! When one man sins, will You be wrathful with the whole community?” (16:20-22)
They said to him, “What must we do to you to make the sea calm around us?” For the sea was growing more and more stormy. “Heave me overboard, and the sea will calm down for you; for I know that this terrible storm came upon you on my account.” (Jonah 1:11-12)
To be modern is to live in a society culturally and politically shaped by the trinitarian value system of the French Revolution: “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” Yet these values do not easily cohere. Pure liberty, the right to individual expression, conflicts with equality. The one celebrates difference, while the latter sees difference as unruly and unfair. Liberty also conflicts with fraternity, the value that would turn citizens into brothers and sisters, and, eventually, comrades, replacing the family with the state. For liberty is about the right to choose whom we love and identify with, while fraternity requires that we be patriotic, no matter what. All three ideals are, in the abstract, noble. Individualism, social responsibility, and a sense of connection to one’s fellow citizens, are good ingredients. The difficulty is in figuring out how to balance them. Moderns by and large don’t disagree on the principles, but on the application. Theoretically speaking, libertarians optimize for liberty; communists optimize for equality; communitarians and nationalists optimize for fraternity.
In this week’s parashah, Korach, we read of an insurrection whose core challenge to the leadership of Moses and Aaron is that organizational hierarchy conflicts with the principle that “everyone is holy.” There is good reason to think Korach makes his argument in bad faith. The Midrash amplifies the point, suggesting Korach possessed a third of the world’s wealth, making him the quintessential “limousine socialist.” Yet if Korach uses a veneer of principled thinking for his own gain, it’s also the case that much of what he says is true. The people are indeed all holy—or have reason to think they are. Last week, at the end of parshat Shelach, the commandment to wear tzitzit was given to everyone. The t’chelet or dyed purple thread in the tzitzit was a marker of priestliness. On some level, expressed through a shared dress code, the Torah suggests that everyone is a priest. Everyone is an equal. The Lord is in everyone’s midst.
Korach’s conclusion is wrong, though. The sheer fact that people are formally—or even spiritually—equal, is not argument against organizational hierarchy or social inequality. In viewing the prophet and the priest primarily as offices of privilege and prestige, rather than as divine appointments to serve, Korach misses the point. But his mistake—or, rather, his deception—are entirely reasonable. For when looking at the world strictly through a social-critical lens, where everything is about who holds power and who does not, it is easy to see how Moses and Aaron can appear to be illegitimate leaders whose advantage over the people is unfair.
The ironic power of the story, then, comes when Moses and Aaron argue with God not to destroy the people for listening to the insurrectionists. It is their defense of the people and argument with God—I believe—that demonstrates their legitimacy more than the spectacular scene in which Korach and his followers are swallowed by the earth. Moses and Aaron are offered a chance to cash-in on their social position. God will destroy the people, but preserve them. Instead, they use their position to protect the people, demonstrating that some forms of social inequality and hierarchy are not only compatible with the view that “everyone is holy,” but necessary for realizing it.
Moses and Aaron argue against collective punishment, following in the tradition of Abraham’s (failed) argument with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. To put it in modern terms, they use the principle of liberty—the notion that individuals should not be reductively judged on account of the groups to which they belong—to defend the people. Consider that if Korach is right—and everyone is to be judged equally—this also comes with the downside of collective punishment. Korach was too busy concerning himself with the privileges of the priests that he missed the other side of that privilege—the priests have a dangerous job and are held to a higher standard than everyone else. If the people continuously fail to pass the basic tests put to them, how can they be expected to meet the even-more-onerous priestly ones?
The story of Jonah makes for a fascinating parallel to that of Korach in that Jonah embodies aspects of both Korach and Moses. He is the consummate figure of internal struggle. If we consider that Korach and his band challenge Moses’s prophetic authority, Jonah’s reluctance to be a prophet—his desire to run in the opposite direction that God tells him—is its own a kind of insurrection. It’s an insurrection against his own prophetic authority. Like Korach, Jonah is swallowed up. Korach is swallowed by the earth; Jonah by a fish. (The sons of Korach eventually become psalmists, which the Midrash imagines as a sign of re-birth and repentance; likewise, Jonah eventually is spat out by the fish).
Jonah is also Moses-like in that he sacrifices himself for the community. When God sends a storm—collectively punishing the sailors—Jonah volunteers to jump overboard so as to calm the sea. The sailors may all be equally holy, but they are not equally responsible for the storm. The last line of the book of Jonah—God’s rhetorical question—posed to the prophet, and to us, underscores the wrongness of collective punishment:
“And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well!” (4:11)
God implies that the wicked city should be saved, in part, on account of the unlucky bystanders who are not wicked but simply happen to be born into a wicked society. This is not an argument from equality, but one from liberty. Not all residents of Nineveh are equal. It’s even more ironic that God’s examples of innocent bystanders are young children and animals. If Korach’s argument against social hierarchy were taken to its logical limit, young children and animals would have to be considered as mature adults—but then they would have to be judged as complicit in the sins of Nineveh.
We are generally conditioned to regard inequality—in the abstract—as a backwards, undemocratic phenomenon worthy of embarrassment. But we fail to appreciate that inequality is also the basis for nuanced judgment, for distinguishing case A from case B. Din—judgment—wants strict, formal equality. Mercy and love respond to and foment inequality because they grasp that humanity is found in singularity.
There is no contradiction between Korach’s principle that everyone is holy, the Torah’s teaching that we are created in the singular image of a singular God, and the fact that Aaron and Moses are appointed to lead the people. Metaphysical equality does not require us to run the world as a flat organization; rather, when we appreciate that everyone is holy we are better able to consider that what makes us holy is not some categorical abstraction that we all have, but our individual differences. It is the recognition that we are all holy that leads Moses and Aaron to plead for mercy for the people. It is the recognition that we are all holy that leads Jonah to save his shipmates from suffering the fate that he alone deserves. It is the recognition that we are all holy that leads God to save the people of Nineveh, separating out the innocent from the guilty.
We are not reducible to the societies in which we live, the company we keep, the language we speak, or even the beliefs we espouse. The flattening of people to some easily discernible aspect they have in common with others is an impoverished form of equality. It’s the kind of equality in which, to prevent anyone from having a bigger slice of pie than anyone else, nobody is allowed to eat.
The conflation of metaphysical equality and social equality ends up corrupting both. Korach is a proto-modern not because he vocalizes egalitarian ideals, but because he introduces us to a hermeneutics of suspicion in which religion and theology are seen exclusively to be a function of politics. The Mosaic retort to the Korachite who says “Everything is political” is “yes, and: everything is spiritual.” Because Korach can only see the political, because he sees spiritual discourse and religious ritual purely as instruments of power, he cannot share the earth with others.
Yet Korach’s children are psalmists. We know that psalms come from the depths (“from the depths I cried out to You”). What could be a greater depth than the hollow of the earth? When we hear Korach’s critique as a psalm in disguise, as a plea of despair, a cry of disillusionment, he no longer appears as the villain he is. Korach is the voice of doubt we all carry, a voice that finds no transcendence in this life, just things as they are.
To turn Korach into a proto-psalmist is radical: politically speaking, Korach must go. But metaphysically speaking, even his deceitful voice is, in essence, a voice of truth. Korach is holy—and that is why even as we dismiss him, in practice, from the community, his critical expression must be re-integrated as song.
A Song of the Children of Korach: “My soul thirsts for God, the living God.” (42:-3)
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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