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.