Friday, June 23, 2017

Man Of God, Man Of The People: A Tale Of Two Brothers--Korach.17

Man Of God, Man Of The People: A Tale Of Two Brothers
D’var Torah for Parashat Korach
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
June 24, 2017


Since olden times, in trying to make Torah more easily grasped, rabbis, teachers and even artists have attempted to distill its core and craft it into something like a Readers’ Digest version, one that omits the details while yet retaining the essence.

The famous story from the Talmud of Hillel and Shammai, the two leading rabbis of the early 1st century, is an example.  In this story, a heathen approaches Shammai and asks to be taught the entire Torah while “standing on one foot.” The stricter of the two rabbis, Shammai, repulses the man with a builder’s yardstick.  The heathen then approaches Hillel with the same request.  The gentler Hillel teaches him: “What is hateful unto you do not do to anyone else; that is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary.” That is indeed a pretty good distillation of the Torah’s teaching.

I make no claims upon a shorter, more concise or abbreviated version of the Five Books of Moses.  I do, however, have two images in mind that illustrate what I see as the revolutionary message of the Torah and Judaism.

The first image is that of Moses parting the Red Sea.  In this powerful scene, Moses is instructed by God to lift his staff and extend his hand over the sea. The image has been illustrated countless times.  Retold over and again, it is embedded in our minds, recalling the Exodus, that great moment in our people’s history that crowns Israel’s emergence from slavery to freedom.

Less frequently repeated is another image, one found in this week’s Torah portion, Korach (Numbers 16:1—18:32).  Like his cousins Moses and Aaron, Korach was a Levite.  Disgruntled at being passed over for a position of greater power, Korach leads an armed rebellion.  Though he and his men end up being swallowed up by the earth, Korach’s rebellion is not over. The next day, the Israelites gang up on Moses and Aaron, blaming them for the catastrophe.  Displeased, God causes a plague to break out in the camp, triggering even more death and destruction.

It is at this moment that Moses—Moses, not God—sends Aaron on a mission. “Take your censer, your incense burner, take fire from the altar and go out among the people, for the plague has broken.”  Without a moment’s hesitation, Aaron obeys. He runs out into the conflagration and, standing “between the dead and the living,” holds up high his censer, putting a halt to the plague.

This image of Aaron standing in the midst of the chaos, between life and death, between darkness and light, is one that stands out for me more than almost any other in the Torah.

Moses and Aaron, two brothers, each fulfilling a sacred mission:  Each is grasping in his hand the tool that represents his task.  In Moses’s hand is the shepherd’s staff; Aaron holds the incense burner, symbol of his role as the High Priest.  Moses holds his staff high over the waters of the Red Sea; Aaron holds his censer up for the people to see.  The miracle that each performs is so great that in both cases the Israelites are saved from impending disaster and their faith in God is restored.

The images are similar, and yet the differences between them are telling.

Moses at the Red Sea is an extension of God’s might.  His outstretched arm reminds the people of God’s might.  Though it is a powerful image, it isn’t new to them.  They have seen Moses communing with God; they have seen him descend from Mount Sinai holding the Ten Commandments. More than anyone else before or after him, Moses is the quintessential Man of God.

Aaron, on the other hand, is a man of the people.  He knows the people well. He grew up among them—a slave, not a prince.  He suffered Pharaoh’s cruelty when Moses had run away from it.  Aaron understands the people’s passion, their jealousy, their doubts and their fears. His love for them comes from the common fate and life they shared.  And so, without giving a second thought to the danger he was putting himself in, Aaron runs to his people and plants himself squarely “between the dead and the living,” as though to stem with his own body the raging plague.

That, to me, is the essence of the Torah’s teaching, for it says to me that prayer is not enough. It isn’t enough to simply have faith in God; one must also follow through with acts of courage, loving-kindness and, sometimes, even self-sacrifice.

Moses was a unique, singular human being.  No one else ever saw God’s face or conversed with God as one would with one’s fellow.  But Aaron stands for each one of us.  If Moses is the quintessential Man of God, Aaron is the true model of a Man of the People. 

“Be of the disciples of Aaron,” the rabbis teach us.  And what they mean by this is that we must do more than merely bond in faith with God.  God’s goal for the People of Israel is to be a holy nation, a nation of priests.  And what that means is that we must be there for one another; to tend to our fellow human being; to feel his or her pain; to listen to their plaints; to offer a compassionate heart and a helping hand; to give them hope when hope is lost.

The two images—of Moses holding up his staff and Aaron, his censer—convey the revolutionary message of the Torah: that holiness is as much in God’s hands as it is in ours, and that the one does not exist without the other.




© 2017 by Boaz D. Heilman

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