This week's parsha, Korach, is focused on conflict - and on conflict resolution and the use of power. Unfortunately, it's a topic still quite relevant to today's world, as humans haven't seemed to have learned much in the last couple millennia :-(
The basic conflict in Korach is about power: who will lead the Israelites? Korach's rebellion against Moses is one of the greatest challenges faced during the Israelites' forty years in the wilderness.
Rabbi Avraham Feder, in a recent commentary, points out that
Moses has a plan, a program, a goal, a sense of noble destiny for his people... Korah and his band, on the other hand, have not only rejected the plan, they have neither an alternative plan nor an alternative vision of Israel's destiny.... In Jewish tradition, Korah has represented rebellion out of conceit. The Torah is not against rebellion in principle. After all, the exodus from Egypt... is basically a rebellion. But it is not a rebellion of conceit.... Korah appears to be demanding recognition for all of the people... but he is really jealous of the power he sees as centralized in the hands of Moses. the demagoguery of Korah and his 'gang' is aimed at winning power for themselves. They are prepared to have all of Israel swallowed up by the civil war that would be certain to follow any success they might have.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, one of my favorite commentators:
the story of Korach is intensely realistic. A leader is able to mobilise a people by articulating a vision. But the journey from the real to the ideal, from starting point to destination, is fraught with setbacks and disappointments. That is when leaders are in danger of being deposed or assassinated. Korach is the eternal symbol of a perennial type: the coldly calculating man of ambition who foments discontent against a leader, accusing him of being a self-seeking tyrant. He opposes him in the name of freedom, but what he really wants is to become a tyrant himself.
Any similarity to modern American politics is not coincidental....people are people.....
Moses sees the rebellion as dangerous enough to the Israelites that he asks G-d for a miracle, and receives it, but with a twist in the resulting reaction:
Rabbi Sacks, again:
the ground under them split apart and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them, with their households and all Korah's men and all their possessions....It is impossible to imagine a more dramatic vindication.... G-d has answered Moses and demonstrated that He is with him and against the rebels. Yet this did not end the argument. That is what is extraordinary. Far from being intimidated, cowed, apologetic and repentant, the Israelites return the next morning still complaining - this time, not about who should lead whom but about the way Moses had chosen to end the dispute:
The next day the whole Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. "You have killed the LORD's people," they said.
You may be right, they imply, and Korach may have been wrong. But is this a way to win an argument? To cause your opponents to be swallowed up alive?
The pursuit of power and not truth leads not only to conflict but loss of personal integrity:
and more Rabbi Sacks ;-)
What the entire episode shows is the destructive nature of argument not for the sake of heaven - that is, argument for the sake of victory. In such a conflict what is at stake is not truth but power, and the result is that both sides suffer. If you win, I lose. But if I win, I also lose, because in diminishing you, I diminish myself. Even a Moses is brought low, laying himself open to the charge that "You have killed the Lord's people."
It's a lesson many US politicians could learn from, quoting Rabbi Sacks again:
The use of force never ends a conflict. It merely adds grievance to injury. Even the miracle of the ground opening up and swallowing his opponents did not secure for Moses the vindication he sought....The episode of Korach teaches us that there are two ways of resolving conflict: by force and by persuasion. The first negates your opponent. The second enlists your opponent, taking his/her challenge seriously and addressing it. Force never ends conflict - not even in the case of Moses, not even when the force is miraculous. There never was a more decisive intervention than the miracle that swallowed up Korach and his fellow rebels. Yet it did not end the conflict. It deepened it.
Along with several other of the commentators I read this week, Rabbi Sacks points out that entire Israelite people complained after the miraculous resolution, not just a small group of rebels. Winning by force -- then or now -- creates longer, deeper conflict.