(Delivered July 6, 2024)

Shabbat shalom & Hodesh tov! 

In case you hadn’t noticed, this is my first Shabbat as the official settled rabbi of TAA. I am uncharacteristically resorting to understatement when I say I am very happy to be here.

Being as I’m stepping into a new and bigger role, I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership. Luckily for me, Parshat Korach is also engaged in that question. Unluckily for me, Parshat Korach is not what you’d call unproblematic when it comes to leadership lessons. With four separate rebellions brewing, all of them connected to the title character—whom the Bible scholar Jacob Milgrom calls the arch-conspirator—the picture is muddy at best. Instead of giving us easy answers, Parshat Korach is inviting us to reflect on the big questions around leadership: Who gets to be a leader? Where does power actually come from? How does the leader’s intrinsic motivation play out? What is the role of followers in creating or ratifying leadership? 

Under the triennial system, we don’t read the opening of the parsha this year, so you’ll just have to believe me when I tell you it’s a whopper, a passage that takes what we think we know about leadership—and about the Israelites, and about God, and about basic right and wrong—and looks at it as if through a distorted fish-eye lens. 

The setup is this: Korach, a great-great-grandson of Jacob our Forefather, along with a pretty strong sampling of supposedly reputable Israelite men from good families, confronts Moses in rebellion. Korach says to Moses and Aaron:

 רַב־לָכֶם כִּי כׇל־הָעֵדָה כֻּלָּם קְדֹשִׁים וּבְתוֹכָם יי וּמַדּוּעַ תִּתְנַשְּׂאוּ עַל־קְהַל יי׃

Too much is yours! For the whole congregation—all of them—are holy, and God is within them. Why do you lift yourselves up over God’s community?

On the surface, this is a good argument. Korach’s message reaches back to Parshat Yitro, and the instruction to become מַמְלֶכֶת כֹּהֲנִים וְגוֹי קָדוֹשׁ—a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. And in a happy coincidence considering the secular holiday we just celebrated this week, it also reaches forward to the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”

But as you know from the second aliyah, it doesn’t go well for Korach. Rather than being covered with accolades for his progressive thinking, Korach meets a terrible end as the ground opens up and swallows him and his fellow rebels entirely. 

Why does a person who is saying all the right things meet such a terrible fate? It’s hard to fathom. The Rabbis suggest that Korach was motivated by ego and resentment. Aggrieved that Moses and Aaron—as leader and high priest respectively—had more stature and power than he did, Korach saw himself as the rightful third in command on account of his father’s place in the family tree. Korach’s beautiful, plausible words, the Rabbis imply, were not entirely sincere. Rather they were like a campaign speech designed to make the speaker look better by making his rival look bad. It’s this unsavory motivation that sparks our sages in Pirkei Avot chapter 5 mishnah 17 to cite Korach as the archetype of מחלוקת שאינה לשם שמים—an argument that is not in the name of heaven. 

The nineteenth-century Russian commentator, the Malbim, makes a subtle distinction about the Avot mishnah, noting the way the parallel structure of the mishnah suggests that the מחלוקת—the argument—that gets characterized as not being in the name of heaven, is not between Korach and Moses, but rather between Korach and his cohort of discontents. In the Malbim’s view, silver-tongued Korach leverages the resentments of others in order to gain power. His beautiful words are a double-edged sword, flattering the listener who most needs to be flattered, while disguising his hunger for the spotlight. In this case, the followers make the leader as much as the leader makes the followers: there’s a symbiosis between Korach’s needs and the rebels’ needs. As my late grandmother might say, they deserve each other. So this is one way of looking at the question of why Korach, with his eloquent and humanistic-sounding mission statement, meets this horrible fate. 

We also know, again from Parshat Yitro, that Moses has been guided toward sharing leadership. What if Korach had taken the longer road to leadership, offering himself as an assistant to Moses, working his way up the chain of command? Perhaps he might have attained the position he so badly wanted, the old-fashioned way, by earning it. Had this been his path, perhaps he would have felt more invested in the community as a whole, secure of his place in it and willing to approach with humility rather than hubris.

As the guys and I were discussing the parsha the other night, my son, perhaps under the influence of his aliyah, in which the glory of God suddenly suffused the Tent of Meeting, had a different idea of why Korach was so harshly punished. Maybe the lesson is that the ultimate judgment is God’s, that our human capacities are finite and therefore our moral analysis is definitionally limited. What looks clear to us might look very different if seen from a wide enough perspective. Submitting to divine will rather than forcing our own keeps us grounded—in the non-Korach, above ground, kind of way.

So what are the lessons for us as we enter into this relationship of rabbi and congregation? First, leadership requires humility. Not the false kind of humility that performs smallness while angling for more influence and prestige, but rather the kind of humility that Laila taught us about at Shavuot. The humility of knowing when it’s your turn to speak and when it’s your turn to listen, of having the courage to step forward when your contribution is needed, and the generosity to support others when the moment calls for their contribution. 

Second, and intertwined with humility: leadership can be shared and cultivated. To my delight, we had a robust number of folks chanting from the Torah today. In the coming weeks and months, I hope we’ll have more and more people on the bimah, leading parts of services or sharing words of Torah. (Side note: If you’ve sat in the seats and thought, I could do that! or I have a thought about that! or I could learn how to do that! please let me know. I’m happy to work with you or to help you find resources to build the skills you want to develop.)

The third leadership lesson I am taking from Parshat Korach, inextricably linked with the previous two, is that leaders and followers have a role in forming one another. The Israelites (mostly) follow Moses, and through his experiences with them—good and bad—he learns to be a leader. Korach, meanwhile, also finds his people, playing on their worst impulses with words that give them a false sense of their own righteousness. In each case, for better and worse, leader and followers teach each other what they’re looking for. For me, at this juncture in particular, this means asking you to share your institutional knowledge with me so that I can learn to meet your needs. And it means, sometimes, I might take a chance and go my own way because I believe there will be benefit for our community down that path.

And all of it under the umbrella that Akiva pointed out to me: the idea of, and search for, the divine will in everything we do.

Our liturgy actually gives us a glimpse of this model of mutuality informed by divinity. Each morning we imitate the angels on high as we say: 

וְכֻלָּם מְקַבְּלִים עֲלֵיהֶם עֹל מַלְכוּת שָׁמַיִם זֶה מִזֶּה

And they all receive upon themselves the yoke of God’s rule, one from another

And then we continue:

וְנוֹתְנִים רְשׁוּת זֶה לָזֶה

And give permission, one to another

We take God’s will upon ourselves in relationship, and we grant each other the freedom to enact it. Many congregations insert an additional word, בְּאָהָבָה—with love—in that granting of permission. וְנוֹתְנִים בְּאָהָבָה רְשׁוּת זֶה לָזֶה. Our lives as a community are bound by these things: by caring, humble leadership; by loving companionship; and by listening earnestly for the divine voice amid the fireworks of everyday life. 

May we merit all these, and may we go forward from strength to strength, בְּאָהָבָה.

Shabbat shalom!