"Take them (with words)"
Persuasion, Sacrifice, and the Call to Transcend in Beha'alotcha
In this week’s parasha, Beha’alotcha, God tells Moshe something that sounds procedural but is anything but:
קַח אֶת הַלְוִיים — Take the Levites. (Numbers 8:6)
It sounds like logistics; take these people, do what needs to be done. But Rashi hears something deeper, something pedagogical. He writes:
"Take them with words—say to them: How fortunate you are to serve before the Divine." (Rashi on Numbers 8:6)
Moshe has to persuade the Levites. He can’t just assign them their role. He must inspire them to want to serve. He has to make them see that their apparent loss of property, status, and inheritance is actually a kind of glory. That being set apart doesn’t mean being diminished; it means being devoted. Moses’s pep talk is, in a way, not just for the Levites as a class, but to all Jews who are, after all, a nation of priests (mamlekhet kohanim) On the one hand, “It’s hard to be a Jew” (schwer zu sein a yid) and on the other hand, it’s a tremendous blessing (…asher bachur banu mikol ha’amim v’natan lanu et Torato)
Rashi’s comment hints that not all Levites were eager. Who would be? Sacrifice can be counter-intuitive, especially when one looks on at all those who don’t.
To give up the material securities every other tribe enjoys, to shave your head and become visibly other, to serve without fanfare or land. It takes buy-in, commitment, faith. Rashi, getting “meta,” effectively says that God commands Moses to give a “D’var Torah” to the Levites so as to appeal to their better nature. His job is to help the Levites see their own effacement as meaningful rather than austere.
To appreciate what’s going on with this word kach, “take,” we need to set it alongside two other mono-syllabic imperatives in the Torah: Lech (go) and Shlach (send).
Lech—“go”—is what God tells Abraham: Lech lecha. It’s personal, existential, and solitary. It’s a command to self-actualize by departing from everything familiar.
Shlach—“send”—is what God tells Moshe to do with the spies: Shlach lecha anashim. It’s delegatory. The sender stays back while others are sent to do the work.
But kach—“take”—follows a middle path . It’s not the solitary hero’s journey nor the managerial act of delegation.It means: draw them in, with you, toward something they might not yet understand but can come to desire. Take them with you.
And kach—in this personal, relational sense—is only used to take people three times in the entire Torah.
The first is “Kach-na et bincha...” — Take your son, your only one... (Genesis 22:2). Abraham is asked to “take” Isaac, but it’s not simply to bring him somewhere. The Midrash says Isaac consents. He’s thirty-seven. He could resist. But he doesn’t. This is kach involves a mutual surrender, sacrifice that is chosen by both Abraham and Isaac. True, “take” could imply a non-consensual relation, but read through our lens, this would be a forfeiture
The second is “Kach et haLevi’im,” our verse.
The third is “Kach l’cha et Yehoshua...” — Take for yourself Joshua... (Numbers 27:18). Joshua must step into Moshe’s place. It’s not a promotion; it’s a burden. And Yehoshua has to want it. Moshe lays both hands on him, not just transferring power, but affirming presence. This is kach as succession; leadership as gift and weight.
Now here’s where the rabbinic mind links kach to the legal world of kinyan, acquisition. In Jewish law, to take something is to become responsible for it. Abraham “takes” a field to bury Sarah; a man “takes” a wife, according to Kiddushin 2a. But this kind of taking is never about mere possession; crucially, it only works with consent. A Levite cannot be conscripted into transcendence. He must be wooed.
The parallel between Abraham taking Isaac and Moses taking Yehoshua is heart-wrenching. Is Joshua a sacrifice in the same way that Isaac is? Or, conversely, is the path to Isaac’s succession (your only son) only way of the altar, under his father’s knife? And just as Abraham must go for himself, Moses must take Joshua, for himself; that is, in contrast to Abraham who must find it in himself to follow God, Moses must find it in himself to transmit tradition to the next generation. It’s no longer enough just to leave a place; you have to impart the journey to one’s students, enabling them to find their own lech l’cha moments, all while carrying on the lineage.
Enter Korach, our foil.
וַיִּקַּ֣ח קֹ֔רַח (“Korach took…”)
Korach, poetically, also takes, though the text never specifies exactly what he takes. But clearly Moses’s taking of the Levites is challenged by Korach’s own taking, perhaps a taking of himself, a pure individualism.
Korach is a Levite who rejects Moses’s bid. He sees Aaron’s garments, rich, adorned, elevated, and compares them to his own stripped-down aesthetic. His envy grows. The Midrash says Korach was wealthy (Sanhedrin 110a), having discovered one of the treasures that Yosef had buried while viceroy in Egypt. Maybe Korach could live with simplicity if everyone were equally simple. But Aaron’s sartorial grandeur triggers him. Korach has no way to flex.
Bamidbar Rabbah (18) links Korach’s rebellion directly to God’s command to “take the Levites.”
When Moshe shaved Korach as part of the Levite purification ritual, Korach felt humiliated. He tells others that Moshe had him lifted up and waved like an offering. He then sees Aaron adorned like a bride and is overcome with resentment. “Moses is king,” they say, “Aaron is high priest, and the rest of us are left with the burdens.”
The Torah says “Vayikach Korach”—Korach took. Just as Moshe “took” the Levites with persuasion and purpose, Korach “takes” for himself, but it’s a different kind of taking: grasping, not giving. “He took counsel with his wife.” He took his cloak and his pride and his grievance. He took others down with him.
We might think Korach’s rejection is just personal envy, but there’s a deeper social logic at work. In his analysis of symbolic systems, Bourdieu teaches that every social field has its own form of capital. What counts in one sphere (money, power, fame) means little in another. The Levites are being invited to give up material capital in exchange for symbolic capital, presence, service, spiritual distinction. Korach doesn’t buy it. He tries to convert his economic capital into religious authority. And it fails, because it violates the internal logic of the spiritual field.
To take someone in this sacred sense is not to own them. It’s to create the conditions for responsible self-offering. The taker doesn’t dominate; he draws out. And the one taken is not diminished, but dignified, by choosing to be chosen.
This is what spiritual leadership demands. A teacher doesn’t force a student to conform. She inspires the student to rise.
Kach is not a technique. It’s not a management strategy. It’s a theology of human greatness.
Sometimes, the holiest work begins not with structure or command, but with a moment of speech. A few words that open the door to something higher. A conversation that changes a life.
Korach exposes the limits of our words in the face of certain kinds of natures or environments. The gleam of Aaron’s garb overwhelms Korach. Yet Korach’s children become psalmists. Where Korach regarded aesthetics as self-expression and felt confined by the monotony of Levitical form, his children found a compromise in choral ode, in song that was neither purely individualistic nor nameless. The name of Korach lives on through them.
A maskil of the children of Korach
Like a hind crying for water,
my soul cries for You, O God;
my soul thirsts for God, the living God;
O when will I come to appear before God! (Psalm 42:1-3)
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins