Parashat Korach: Recruitment and Selection - The Torah Way

I’d like you to imagine that you have been miraculously whisked back in time to Egypt and have metamorphosed into a Hebrew slave.  You see no end to your misery.  Unbeknownst to you Moshe Rabbeinu, who you haven’t heard of, has just encountered Gd at the Burning Bush on Mount Horeb hundreds of miles away.

After a hard day’s work, you attend a secret meeting along with the Princes of the twelve tribes (the ones we read about in Parashot Bemidbar and Naso).  You are a respected member of the Va’ad (committee) whose aim is to elect a leader that will represent your interests to the Royal Court.

In hushed voices (because you don’t want the guards to hear), you formulate a plan to elect a leader.  Designated members of each tribe inscribe the advertisement on clay tablets and these will be passed around the respective Elders.  Soon, nominations will take place to put forward a few candidates from each tribe and through the process, eventually, the person who most impresses the committee will be elected as de-facto leader of the Israelites.

However, before this happens, you need to have an idea of what kind of leader you are looking for.  Amongst the committee you decide the following essential requirements:

1.    The ideal person for the job should be someone who has experienced slavery and so understands the mentality of the people he is representing.

2.    He should not have any ‘skeletons in the closet’ when it comes to historical events that he has been involved in.

3.    He should not be too young (inexperienced) or old (frail).

4.    He should be a good communicator with fine oratory skills.

5.    He should delegate responsibility to others when required.

6.    He should have a measured temperament so that he will have the patience to deal with problems efficiently.

The Princes dutifully inscribe these details and after a few questions (which we term as ‘any other business’), the meeting is adjourned.  A date is set for the next session and the attendees slip off into the night.  Job done!

You won’t read any of this in the Torah because of course it didn’t happen. Moshe didn’t apply for the role as he was personally headhunted by Gd (see Shemot: 3.10).  Had the situation been different and he’d applied on his own merits, would he have stood a chance of fulfilling the position? Looking back at our list, let us see how he measured up:

1.    The ideal person for the job should be someone who has experienced slavery and so understands the mentality of the people he is representing.

Moshe grew up in the Royal Household having been rescued from the Nile by Pharaoh’s daughter.  He did not experience slavery.  (Shemot: 2.6-9).  That’s a ‘no’ to the first criteria.

2.    He should not have any ‘skeletons in the closet’ when it comes to historical events that he has been involved in.  Moshe killed an Egyptian taskmaster who was beating a Hebrew slave (2.12).  A second ‘no’.

3.    He should not be too young (inexperienced) or old (frail).  Moshe was eighty years old when he and his brother spoke to Pharaoh (7.11).  Third time unlucky.

4.    He should be a good communicator with fine oratory skills.  When Moshe met with Gd at the Burning Bush and used every excuse not to lead the Israelites, he said that he was ‘not a man of words and slow of speech’ (4.10, which he emphasised again in 6.12).  A fourth reason not to put him forward.

5.    He should delegate responsibility to others when required.  Moshe’s father-in-law, Yitro was concerned as to how Moshe was judging the people from ‘morning to evening’ (18.14) without delegating this arduous task to others, to the point that he suggested setting a system of judges to help ease the workload (18.  16-23).  A fifth negative point.

6.    He should have a measured temperament so that he will have the patience to deal with problems efficiently.  There are numerous references in the Torah where Moshe lost his temper, the most famous of which resulted in his not being allowed to enter the Land of Israel due to hitting the rock (Bemidbar 20.10-11).  The final reason why the eventual postholder would be unsuitable according to this requirement.

All the above serve to illustrate the point that, had the Israelites wished to recruit and eventually select a leader using the formula I have described, Moshe wouldn’t have made it through the first round as he ‘failed’ each of the suggested criteria.  It wasn’t a case of these constituting the ‘desired’ requirements that one might wish for, but those that were deemed ‘essential’ to representing the people to Pharaoh.  That their successful candidate would eventually lead them out of Egyptian bondage would not have even entered their minds at that juncture.

As the wise Yiddish saying goes: ‘Der Mensch Tracht, Un Gott Lacht – Man plans and Gd laughs’.

From the outset, Gd decided that Moshe, the grandson of Levi, would be the person who would take on what was (and remains) an impossible job – commandeering an entire nation of Jews through a desert over a period of four decades!  Are you surprised that he fell at the last hurdle?!

But joking aside, until this week’s Parasha, he had managed to successfully negotiate some very serious incidents that included the sin of the Golden Calf and the debacle following the evil report of the spies that we read about last week.  Let us not forget to recall numerous incidences of major complaints regarding the desert cuisine emanating from the Divine Presence.

And then a family broigus nearly brought it all tumbling down with a potential power grab at the hands of his first cousin, Korach.  His complaint was precisely based on what I have previously referred to.  He says to Moshe and Aharon:

Bemidbar: 16.3

“You have gone too far.  The whole community are holy, every one of them and the Lord is with them.  Why then do you set yourselves above Gd’s congregation?”

 Rashi explains this as (sic): “As you took the kingship for yourself, what gave you the right to choose the priesthood for your brother?  Everyone at Sinai heard the command, “I am the Lord Your Gd.”  All the congregation heard it!  Gd had requested that the people be a ‘kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exodus 19.6) which translates as (according to Rabbi Sacks ztl) ‘a kingdom whose members are (in some sense) priests and a nation all of whose citizens are holy’.  Stating that the community in its entirety was holy and were valued equally by Gd was correct.  Had he stopped there, he wouldn’t have said anything controversial.

Where he erred was in his next statement of asking why Moshe and Aharon ‘set themselves above everyone else’.  For one thing, Moshe had not applied for the job.  Secondly, Korach misunderstood the kind of leader his cousin was.  He accused Moshe of being a king (as per Rashi’s commentary) and his interpretation of what a monarch happened to be, was based on the model of Pharaoh who saw himself as being in the image and likeness of Gd.  (see Rabbi Sacks’ article: ‘Korah: Servant Leadership’ in ‘Lessons in Leadership, Maggid 2015’).  Israelite Kings however were different to others in that they were considered as equals to their compatriots in the eyes of Heaven.  In Devarim, Chapter 17, Gd sets out the criteria for his chosen ruler, which include the following:

·         He must be chosen by Gd himself – Samuel was told to appoint two kings, firstly Saul and then David (‘Set over you a king whom the Lord your Gd chooses’ - 17.15).

·         He must inscribe a copy of this Law upon a scroll...It must always be with him and he shall read from it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his Gd taking care to keep all the words of this commandment and these decrees (18-20).

·         …not considering himself to be superior to his people or straying from the commandments to the right or to the left…’ (17:20).

The Rambam comments on this, “Just as the Torah has granted him the great honour and obligated everyone to revere him, so too it has commanded him to be lowly and empty at heart (as it says in Psalms 109:22): ‘My heart is a void within me.’ Nor should he treat Israel with haughtiness, as it says ‘He should not consider himself better than his fellows.  He should be gracious and merciful to the small and the great, involving himself in their good and welfare.  He should protect the honour of even the humblest of people…’

Korach’s accusations against Moshe were therefore unfounded.  At the heart of his rebellion was a desire to take the leadership role for himself and display all the traits that proved how unfit he was to attain this position.  In short, he may have read our ‘Job Description’, but he didn’t care about the suitability of the ‘ideal candidate’.  As far as he was concerned, the only person fitting for the role was himself.  The welfare of the people he would lead, had he succeeded, were never part of his overall plan.  Moshe’s strengths as a leader were precisely because he met the criteria that the King of Kings required to lead the nation out of Egypt.  That he erred and was denied the ultimate prize does not mean that he was not our greatest ever prophet and leader.  He was just not the right person to take the Israelites into the Promised Land.

Similarly so, in 1999, BBC Radio 4 ran a poll of the most prominent politicians, historians and commentators of the 20^th Century and Winston Churchill was voted the Epoch’s greatest Prime Minister.  We know however, that soon after the end of the War, he was voted out and replaced by Clement Atlee (who attained the third place in the poll).  The latter would have been as unsuitable a premier to lead the country during the Blitz as the former was to commandeer it into the postwar era.

The Torah’s message about the story of Korach is a salutary one which is as relevant today as it was three thousand years ago.  In recent years, the rise of populism in deciding who should lead a country has led to the election of men (and women) who are unfit to rule and have subsequently endangered the lives of the electorate they claimed to represent.  When a premier is more concerned about his own legacy than the welfare of his people, this results in instability both within the country’s borders and throughout the world.  If more of them were like Moshe, instead of Korach, our world be a much safer and happier place in which to live and flourish. 

Shavuah Tov.

Parashat Shelach Lecha: The Kiddush Question

 I love questions!

People ask me questions the whole time and there are fewer thrilling experiences than when a member of my community in Staines poses a conundrum to me that I can't readily answer. These are some of my favourite moments.

Such a situation occurred last week as we were enjoying a delicious kiddush following the Shabbat morning service. The gentleman was holding a fish ball and I was gradually making my way through a (very naughty) rather large piece of chocolate cream cake when he shared this thought:

"Rabbi Claude?"

"Yes?"

"May I ask you a question?"

"Of course. I'll try my best to answer you."

"Regarding the spies, what did they do wrong? Why were they punished? They went to the land of Israel and simply reported back what they had seen. They were being honest. Why should they and the rest of their generation end up wandering the desert until they had died out?"

Another member of the community piped in: 

"Because they didn't have faith in Gd to protect them."

Now, to be honest, that would have probably been my go-to answer. It ticks many boxes.                    We know that these were not just ordinary people but the creme-de-la-creme of their respective tribes. However, something held me back from answering (and with no disrespect to the other respondent), I thanked him and said that I would investigate his question and my answer would constitute this week's Drasha.

At the start of the Parasha, the Torah tells us:

Numbers 13:1-3 

Then The Lord spoke to Moshe: “Send out men to scout (in Hebrew the term used is 'Veyaturu which means literally 'and they should scout') the land of Canaan which I am going to give to the Israelites; one man from each of their ancestral tribes, each a leader among them.” So Moshe sent them at the Lord's command out from the Wilderness of Paran. They were all leading men among the Israelites.

The Torah clearly describes how respected these individuals were. What's more, they were not sent as spies, but as scouts in the guise of tourists. They are only referred to as 'Meraglim' or spies when Moshe recounts this tragic tale in Parashat Devarim.

Moshe gives precise instructions to his VIP 'tourists' of which five are questions.

Numbers 13:17-21

1. Ascend there into the Negev and go up into the hill country.

2. See what the land is like.

3. Are the people who live there strong or weak, few or many?

4. Is the land in which they live a good place or bad?

5. Are the cities in which they live open or fortified?

6. Is the soil rich or poor?

7. Are there trees in it or not?

8. Take courage and bring back some of the fruit of the land.”

When the men return, they respond with the following answers:

'They went straight to Moses and Aaron and the whole Israelite community at Kadesh in the wilderness of Paran, and they made their report to them and to the whole community, as they showed them the fruit of the land.' (which was Moshe's 8th point).

'This is what they told him: “We came to the land you sent us to; it is indeed flowing with milk and with honey, and this is its fruit. '(Moshe's 1st and 2nd command). Then they proceeded to answer the question about the inhabitants (Numbers 3 and 5) 'But the people who live in the land are fierce and the cities are fortified and very large indeed; We even saw the descendants of Anak there.  In the Negev region, Amalek lives; The Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites live in the hill country and the Canaanites live by the Sea and by the Jordan....the land which we journeyed through and scouted is a land that consumes its inhabitants; the people we saw were tall and broad to a man. There we saw the Nefillim - the descendants of Anak are from the Nefillim. We looked to our own eyes like grasshoppers and so we were in theirs....'

Notice how they didn't answer the question about the soil or the trees (Numbers 4,6 and 7), although one could argue that the size of the cluster of grapes that they brought back would indicate that the soil would have been very fertile.

However, as my congregant stated correctly, their answers, though negative were in fact honest. So why were they punished (setting aside the obvious reasoning that their faith in Gd's protection should have negated their fears?) After all, they had recently faced a much more deadly foe in the guise of the most powerful nation on Earth and look what had happened to them?

Rabbi Sacks in his essays from 'Covenant and Conversation: Numbers - The Wilderness Years' (Maggid 2017) cites two equally valid but different interpretations of the text.

The first, according to the Lubavitcher Rebbe ztl constitutes a 'radically revisionary interpretation of the episode' (Rabbi Sacks' quotation). He stipulates that the men had witnessed Gd's defeat of the Egyptians and that, when forty years later, they did enter the land (as described in this week's Haftorah), the inhabitants of Jericho were not giants. In fact, they were as fearful of the Israelites as the spies' descendants were of the Jericho-ites (if there is such a word). The Rebbe's explanation is not that the scouts were afraid of failure, quite the opposite. They were frightened of success. Life in the desert was perfect. They wanted for nothing (as we discussed last week). There was no need to conquer the Wilderness or struggle to grow food in parched soil. The scouts who were, as we have said great individuals cherished their close relationship with Gd. Entering the land would change the status quo vis a vis their current existence. Hence the desire to deliberately sabotage the mission, which is exactly what they achieved.

Where they went wrong was in misunderstanding what it was Gd wanted to achieve by bringing the people to the Land. Rabbi Sacks writes that:

"Gd wanted the Israelites to create a model society where human beings were not treated as slaves, where rulers were not worshipped as demigods, where human dignity was respected, where law was impartially administered to rich and poor alike, where no-one was destitute, no-one was abandoned to isolation, no one was above the law and no realm of life was a morality-free zone. That requires society and a society needs a land. It requires an economy, an army, fields and flocks, labour and enterprise. "

I would add, all of which cannot take place in the arid wilderness which was their current location. They had to enter the land and according to the Rebbe, what they should have realised was that, in conquering Canaan, they would have succeeded. They should not have been afraid.

The second opinion that he cites is that of the Rambam and one which I personally relate to (with no disrespect whatsoever to the Rebbe). It is closer to the plain meaning of the text.

The Rambam looks at Shemot 13.17 which states (at the start of Parashat Beshalach)

Exodus 13:17

When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For Gd said "If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt". So Gd led the people around by the desert road towards the Red Sea"

The Rambam comments on this, stating that 'Here, Gd led the people about, away from the direct route He had originally stated, because he feared that they may encounter hardships too great for their present strengths. So He took them by a different route in order to achieve His original object."

 

Looking at what happened subsequently, Gd's fears were realised as we read in this week's Parasha after the scouts' report regarding the Israelites’ panicked reaction:

They said to each other, “Let us appoint a leader and go back to Egypt.”

The Rambam (in Guide for the Perplexed 3,32) surmises that :” it is a well-known fact that travelling in the wilderness without physical comforts such as bathing produces courage, while the opposite produces faint-heartedness. Besides this, another generation rose during the wanderings that had not been accustomed to degradation and slavery.”

In other words, the current generation who had left Egypt in a physical form had not removed Egypt from its psyche. Just like you can take the Jew out of Golders Green but as I can readily admit, you can never take Golders Green out of the Jew!

The scouts and the people to whom they related their sorry story (honestly or not) were not ready to enter the land of Israel. It would require a new generation that had not known slavery to understand what it meant to be a free individual. You cannot change a society overnight (as Rabbi Sacks' writes). It takes time for this to slowly transpire. It's not so much a case that the scouts gave a terrible report (which they did and they were justifiably punished for), it's the reaction of the people who witnessed the scene and responded in a way that proved how little they were ready to move to the next stage of their emotional and intellectual development.

That could only happen in the generation of the children who were born in the desert where Egyptian slavery and everything that it entailed (including imbibing the immoral culture that was endemic to the Empire) had been expunged from the national consciousness. It would take another 38 years for this to happen. Only Joshua and Caleb, of the original twelve scouts were able to realise the others' mistake. It is for this reason that Joshua's name was changed from Hoshea (salvation) to Yehoshua (Gd delivers). Gd and Moses were aware of what would happen but they had to let the people make their own choices and we know what transpired.

In conclusion, a question over a delicious kiddush inspired the words that you have just heard. I hope that this has not deterred you from asking others! If we can learn Torah from each other, we can truly emulate the words of both the Rambam and the Rebbe. We should never fear success and at the same time, we owe it to ourselves to avoid being caught up in the negative ruminations of others. Even the greatest minds can err as is demonstrated in this week's Parasha. That we were able to survive another existential crisis and recover to be able to reconquer the land in living memory is a testament to Gd's promise that He never abandoned us, irrespective of how many times we didn’t live up to His expectations.

But that, dear friends, is a discussion for another kiddush….

Shavuah Tov.

Parashat Beha'Lotecha: The Nostalgia Trap

"Nostalgia isn't what it used to be" Peter De Vries (1959)                                                                          

Stephnie has a nickname for me. She calls me an 'old soul' (S-O-U-L not S-O-L-E which would mean something very different) because I have long had a love for music and classic Hollywood films that mostly predate me. Give me a choice of watching the latest 'Fast and Furious' sequel ('X' which came out last month) or an old Humphrey Bogart film and I won't think twice before opting for the latter.

Could it be the fact that old movies had something they called 'star quality' in addition to carefully written plots and screenplays that were intricately crafted to tell a story rather than lose their way amongst a myriad of eye-popping special effects?

These productions still come to fore every now and again when you have a filmmaker who cares for the artistic merits of his or her film project. However, trying to sell their idea to the studio executives to raise the necessary capital to finance the film is very difficult.  Especially if it is a quality ‘art-house’ movie.

I therefore manage to be nostalgic for a time that existed before I knew what I was being nostalgic about. It's less a case of rose-coloured glasses than technicolored ones (in Panavasion noch!)

I've been around a while and spoken with enough people to known that the world we inhabit in 2023 is vastly different to the one my parents and grandparents grew up in. Sometimes, I wonder how I would have acted had I been living twenty or thirty years before I was born. How would being part of that generation have shaped my thoughts and opinions? More pointedly, how do I view my own past as an adult, trying to make sense of everything in a society that I find increasingly difficult to comprehend.

In this week's Parasha, we read the following:

Numbers 11:4-6

The rabble in the midst began to have strong cravings and once again, the Israelites began to weep, saying, "Who will give us meat to eat? We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost, the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic. But now our throats are dry. There is nothing at all but this manna to look at."

To put the verses into context, the 'rabble' who started complaining were the opportunistic Egyptians and other non-Israelites who had been recognised by Moshe as an integral part of the Bnei Yisrael. From the outset, they were the instigators of much of the trouble that ensued, including the almost catastrophic episode of the Golden Calf. It is these people who influenced the Israelites and caused them to become nostalgic for the 'fleshpots of Egypt' and that country's produce.

Their argument might seem to be legitimate, except for a number of holes in their collective memory.

The Ramban shines a fascinating light on their gastronomic claims.

He states that when the Israelites talk about the 'fish that they ate for free', they are forgetting  the fact that the Egyptian fishermen, their overseers,  used to put them to work catching fish and they were only allowed to remove some from the net, in order to eat them, as per the local custom for all fishermen. Hardly something that could be considered a 'free meal' granted the effort to obtain it.

He adds that the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic they mention were very abundant as Egypt was known as the 'Garden State'. When they were forced to dig the gardens for their slave masters, they would have naturally come across these fruit and vegetables. He adds that, even if this were not the case and they were working for Pharaoh himself, they would have dug up these foods in the grounds of the royal palaces.

Rashi, taking a different approach, says that since the Israelites were not even given straw to make bricks, in other words 'for free', it is highly unlikely that they would have been offered food without having to pay for it (the true economic meaning of the term 'free'). Additionally, the Erev Rav ('rabble') were never enslaved, so they could not legitimately complain of how their lives had been impacted in their home country.

As for the water, the Israelites lived in Goshen which was situated in the Nile Delta, so it was readily available, along with the fish they cite. Their daily existence was anything but pleasant, living as slaves for over two hundred years.

We know that our memories are clearly selective in nature, especially when it comes to putting forward an argument. Whilst their recollections of the food they ate was no doubt accurate (keeping in mind that this was a relatively short while after they'd left Egypt), they conveniently omitted to include the conditions by which they came across said consumables.

As if to add insult to the injury they have caused, they then proceed to criticize the heaven-sent Manna which the Torah reminds us (in the next verse) was:

Numbers 11:7-8

... like coriander seed, and was like bdellium in colour (white). The people went around gathering it. Then they would grind it in a mill or crush it in a mortar. They cooked it in a pot and made cakes from it. It tasted like cakes made with oil.

It sounds delicious. Did they have to gather it under the threat of being beaten?

The Torah's next verse tells us that:

Numbers 11:9

When the dew fell over the camp at night, the manna would fall upon that.

They simply had to step outside their tents and this Divine food parcel was ready to be picked up. Gd's very own Deliveroo without the service charge added!

Rashi explains that the manna tasted of anything a person wished it to, aside from the list of foodstuffs that the Israelites cited in their complaint. The reason being that these were harmful to nursing mothers (according to the Sifrei, a Midrash) which gives the parable of a king who provides his son with any food he wants except for those that are dangerous. His son then complains that the reason he's not being given these items is because his father doesn't love him. So, with the manna, which, had it tasted of garlic, cucumbers etc, could have injured any of the Israelite women who were nursing their babies. In other words, Gd's gift was being spurned by the people to whom it had been given and the examples they chose to cite were those that were damaging to some of their female kinfolk.

Returning to my original quotation regarding the veracity of nostalgia, this is prima facia evidence of how our views can be distorted by our desires. It is very easy to look at the past wearing those spectacles, but whilst longing for bygone days, we don't realise how fortunate we are to be living in an age when so much is better than it used to be. 

I recently wrote about my great-grandfather passing away at an early age following a gall-bladder operation. Would he have had a better chance of survival these days? Very possibly.  I like watching old movies, but had I been around at the time they were made, I probably wouldn't have had the luxury to view or appreciate them on the kind of media that exists in this present day, such as DVD or Blu Ray. I imagine that the quality of the images viewed in the cinema could never match the digital remastering that invariably enhances their production values.

From all accounts that I've read about, post-war life in the UK in the late 1940s, ‘50s and early '60s was quite grim for many people. When my parents arrived in this country in 1963 from New York, they couldn't believe that their initial abodes didn't have central heating and as a result they experienced the ferocious British winter without adequate protection.

It didn't matter if The Beatles were topping the charts at a time when the living room was the only warm spot in the house due to the location of the fireplace. Who could honestly appreciate great music in a freezing cold bedroom?!

It is easy to become despondent when the news we hear is continuously negative and we naturally hark back to what we consider as having been 'simpler days'. Perhaps we should take a moment to appreciate what we have and look at the kind of lives we lead and the items we can purchase or services we can access that we could never have imagined existing twenty years ago. Who would have believed that we could order anything we desire and have it posted through our letterbox or brought to our doorstep in shopping bags? Perhaps nostalgia isn't worth the time and effort spent dwelling upon.

We will read in subsequent Sidrot of how Gd punished the Israelites when they complained. Had they appreciated the manna and indeed all of Gd's beneficence, our ancestor's entry to the land of Israel would have been a great deal smoother (and sooner). It is a lesson that we can all learn from.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, because it never was as we wish it were. It is like a trap that tries to convince us that our lives used to be better than they actually were.

Whilst it is comforting to think about earlier periods in our journey, especially when we experience challenging times, we should appreciate how blessed we are to be here and how, despite everything, the present is never as bad as we think it is.

We've made it through the week and that is certainly something to appreciate and yes, celebrate. Raise a glass to usher in the next seven days.

L’Chaim and Shavuah Tov!