Why Did The 250 Believe They Would Win?
Adapted from Rabbi Braun’s sermon in 5771
Over the centuries one of the attacks on Orthodox Judaism is that it is overly legalistic. It is too focused on the law and its minutiae and that has negatively impacted Judaism; in fact some argued that it has robbed Judaism of its spirit. That claim was first leveled by Jesus and that early Christians. They felt that the rabbis were too law focused and as Rabbi Lamm once said, they then chose to replace what they deemed the love of law with the law of love.
Many centuries later the early reform Jews felt the same way and this was one of the critiques that led them to abandon so much of the halacha- the Jewish legal system.
This also happens to be one of the arguments that chazal in the Midrash place in the mouth of Korach. Rashi on the first verse of the parsha quotes the well-known Midrash that Korach took the people with him and dressed them in clothing that was made completely of techelet- dyed blue wool. He then presented the following question to Moshe, are we required to attach tzitzit to these 4 cornered garments? Moshe says yes. They began to laugh at Moshe and explained- a white garment only requires one string of each tzitzit to be techelet, can it be that this garment that is all techelet still requires that string?
Korach is arguing that the spirit of the law should override the letter of the law. The value of the law is the spirit only and the spirit is the overriding factor.
Or maybe that is not what Korach believed. There is another Mishrash that levels the exact opposite criticism, the over emphasis on the legalities, at the 250 people with Korach. The first two verses in Parshat Korach detail the people involved in Korach’s plot to overthrow Moshe. There we find Korach, Datan and Aviram, On ben pelet and a group of 250 people. As the story plays out we find out what part each of these parties played and their resulting punishment, with the exception of On ben pelet who we never hear about again. If he was not an important player in the story then why mention him at all but once he is mentioned then one has to wonder, why do we never find out what happens to him at the end?
The Midrash explains that On was involved and prominent but was subsequently saved by his wife who intoxicated him and sat at the door of her tent with her hair loosened and showing, knowing that these 250 people who would come to get him were a holy congregation and they would never approach a woman with her hair uncovered. This played out as she planned; no one approached and by the time On awoke from his stupor the party was over and all of his cohorts were dead.
In addition to all of the other things that the this Midrash does, it clearly portrays these holy 250 people as being wildly concerned with hair covering but not with attacking God and God’s prophet. There is no question that hair covering has its sources in the Torah and in our rabbinic tradition. That being said, the Midrash wonders, how could it be that a group who was so focused on this particular law and so careful about it and so could lose focus on God and what God wants from us. God chose Moses, there was no question about that. Yet these people were willing to challenge that. How could this group be so focused on the trees that they have forgotten to look at the forest?
These different midrashim have presented two diametrically opposite views of the attitudes of Korach and his followers, did they not care of the law at all and only for the spirit or were they overly focused on the laws and their technical aspects?
That same tension can be found in the answers given to the following question. How could it be that the 250 people thought that they would actually win when pitted against Aaron and Moshe? What were they thinking? The Malbim, Rabbi Meir Leibush, argues that Korach and his merry band thought that Moshe had made up the laws.
He points out something that I had never picked up on before. There is an argument between Pharisees and Sadducees regarding where to offer the ketoret, the incense. The Pharisees, the early rabbis believed that it was to be offered in the holy of holies while the Sadducees believed that it should be offered outside of the holies.
This argument plays out in the Korach drama according to the Malbim. Moshe instructs the people and Aaron to take their incense pans lifnei Hashme, before God in the temple yet they take them in front of the tent of meeting. The Torah does not actually tell us that Aaron took his pan because he would have never done it outside. Korach had adopted the Sadducee position and totally rejected the oral law- the law was not all that important. Thus they did not think anything would happen to them because they believed that Moshe had invented these laws!
This is certainly not the only way to read these psukim and probably not even the clearest. What is clear however is that the importance of the law is the point of argument. In the interest of intellectual honesty, the rejection of the oral law is not exactly the same as spirit over letter but I believe that they are interconnected, although that is beyond my time constraints at the moment.
The Meshech Chochmah, Rabbi Meir Simcha of dvinsk, offers the other perspective. He argues that this ketoret was not subject to the regular place and laws of ketoret and that these people thought they would win because they were holy and they were doing the right action. They thought that offering the ketoret would bring them sanctity from God the source of sanctity because that is what the ketoret does!
It seems that they were so focused on the action that they forgot to look at anything else. They never stopped to ask- why would God choose us if he has already chosen Moshe and Aaron? They never stopped to think about the forest because they were so focused on the trees.
Here too we have the same argument – who was Korach and what did he believe? Was he anti law or overly focused on the law? Too much spirit or not enough? Was Korach, to use modern terminology, the reform Jew who has abandoned halacha or the orthodox Jew who sees only the halacha? No equivalent implied there of course.
The answer to that question is – that it is irrelevant because there is no way to know. What is important is the framing of the question and the identifying of the extreme positions to avoid.
Rather we are to strive for the correct balance between the letter and spirit. As Rabbi Soloveitchik would formulate it – each mitzvah has a maaseh and a kiyyum, an action and a fulfillment, a thought or emotion that is meant to result from that action. We are meant to see the forest and the trees and we are meant to do the mitzvoth and have them bring us closer to God and to each other.
