Korach

The parsha opens on a verb with no object: וַיִּקַּח קֹרַח, "and Korach took" — the Torah never says what he took, because the taking was the whole of it. He already had Levite lineage and a place before the Ark, and still he gathered two hundred and fifty men of repute and turned on Moses and Aaron: מַדּוּעַ תִּתְנַשְּׂאוּ, "why do you raise yourselves above the assembly?" — rav lachem (רַב־לָכֶם), "you have gone too far." He looked at the two humblest men alive and saw only a costume of power, as though Moses meant to lord it over them, Wilson on his throne. To him the surface lied: 'The simple smiles and good times seem all wrong.' He read the outside and called it the truth.

The Mei HaShiloach hands us the key. In every soul of Israel, he teaches, there is "a good and precious point that the Blessed One apportioned to it in particular — yet in this world this point is in a garment that appears opposite." The greatest souls are dressed in garments that contradict their essence. Moshe, of whom the Torah testifies he was "very humble," was given the look of arrogance, so they accused him of grasping for power. David came up "ruddy," and Samuel feared a man of blood — until God answered, "with beautiful eyes": read the essence, not the color. Korach was, in the end, 'Too busy to see two versions of me' — the garment and the point beneath it, each of us 'Dripping in this strange design' that God cut on purpose, so the inside must be searched for and is never simply worn.

That is what made his slogan both true and deadly. כָּל־הָעֵדָה כֻּלָּם קְדֹשִׁים, "the whole community, all of them, are holy" — of course they are; but Korach wanted the holiness visible, stamped on the outside, with no garment to see past. 'What is the truth, what is the faithful lasting proof?' he kept demanding — and he wanted it proven on the surface. The proof came from underground, where the earth would Split Open and Melt beneath him and take the costume and the man down together. The avodah he refused is the one left to us: to read past the garment — our own, and everyone else's — to the precious point set inside it. Good Shabbos.