June 12, 2021

Korach

Hello everyone!

Content Warnings for this issue are: holy death-punishment (murder type, plague type), homophobia, antisemitism, apartheid

Korach can be a difficult parsha for rebellious misfit souls like mine to read. Dude took 250 fellow jews and was like “hey Moses and Aaron why are YOU in charge, huh, aren’t we ALL holy, huh” and then the earth swallowed him up and fellow rebels up, and THEN hashem punished the surviving israelites with a plague that killed thousands of them. From an outside-the-story perspective, it’s easy to see what’s going on here–leadership wants to punish dissent and maintain control. From a torah-is-holy perspective, it’s harder.

One of the places Korach is referenced in rabbinic writings is Pirkei Avot 5:17, where it’s explicitly cited as a Bad type of argument as compared with Hillel and Shammai’s disagreements. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has a post on his website about Korach and its interplay here that I like: Korach’s rebellion was not in pursuit of truth, it was simply playing to win. And as a leftist who has many times seen people falsely claim their organization is nonhierarchical when the hierarchy is just secret and based on informal social connections, I wonder if the nonhierarchical populist rebellion that gathered under the name of Korach was not what it claimed to be. I do not see quite the same directions that Rabbi Sacks does, but the interpersonal dynamic is familiar to me and there’s no reason it shouldn’t have existed in ancient israel as much as it does now.

What the entire episode shows is the destructive nature of argument not for the sake of Heaven – that is, argument for the sake of victory. In such a conflict, what is at stake is not truth but power, and the result is that both sides suffer. And, I might add, not just power but continued asymmetry of power–maintaining an unjust power distribution with a different man at the top than there is now, is perhaps a particularly destructive manner of argument.

From classical jewish perspectives, Korach is a bad dude. He is not the hero of the people. He brought up a problem in a shitty way and got a lot of people killed, we assume, unwittingly. But was it? Perhaps he is the type of revolutionary does not care how many deaths his preferred revolution will cause, for this type of false populism has a great deal of overlap with lying about leaderlessness of a given cause. Or maybe, he was just angry about being lost in the wilderness, as other israelites have been before and after, and just took it in a different direction.

And even after all this, even for Korach, the prototypical example of a Bad Rebel, there is hope for teshuvah.

R’ Menachem Azariah DeFano (1548-1620, Italy), Asarah Ma’amarot (Ten Utterances), 3:34 says: ר’ מנחם עזריה מפאנו, עשרה מאמרות, ג:לד והאר״י זצ״ל דרש על קרח פסוק צדיק כתמר יפרח (תהלים צו:יג) שכן שמו רשם בסופי תיבות אלה ללמד שבסוף תקון עולם גם הוא יתקן [T]he Ari (Isaac Luria) expounded the verse “A righteous person will flourish like a date palm, tzadik katamar yifrach” (Ps. 96:13) to be about Korach. For so is Korach’s name impressed in [the letters at] the end of these words (ק, ר, ח), to teach that at the end of world rectification (tikkun olam), even he will be fixed (y’takein). (source

I am still not comfortable with the story of Korach and how it’s treated by many jewish thinkers, and I imagine I will continue wrestling with it in years to come, but these angles help. I do not like a circumstance where there are allowed rebellions and disallowed rebellions and we all just agree; but i equally dislike the idea that we should throw out uncomfortable parts of torah, so here: observe, and feel free to participate in, my own reckonings with it.

https://twitter.com/ashkiconvert/status/1401949556821069826

The Jewsletter Soundtrack this week is Alma’s roundup of modern yiddish performers and its spotify playlist of them, or possibly Rokhl Kafrissen’s roundup of summer yiddish music‘s links to Bandcamp.

I’ve placed this IfNotNow event on unpacking zionism and apartheid in the events list below, but I also wanted to shout out its short reading list of items linked in the event description: an aj+ video, an article about Sheikh Jarrah co-written by a human rights expert and a Palestinian woman, and two posts from 972 Magazine: one about how antizionism can help israelis which isn’t entirely my jam as topics go but should help people broaden their minds; and one explaining and summarizing BTselem’s report on israeli apartheid which I’ve linked to previously. I also recently saw this article by Ilan Baruch and Alon Liel, two of Israel’s ambassadors to South Africa during the apartheid era, who agree that, via the occupation, the Israeli regime is committing apartheid no matter how loudly it claims otherwise.

I hate being one of the difficult Jews but it’s important sometimes.

I don’t want to bang my head against antisemitism and what is to be done about it and how we are or aren’t supposed to talk about it right now but April Rosenblum has finished writing her answer to Jewish Currents’ How Not To Fight Antisemitism editorial and it is good.

Someone reminded me about Ammud, a wonderful educational organization by and for Jews of Color. I didn’t realize they had an allyship circle as well as JOC membership option, though!

There’s a plant called the Wandering Jew. Don’t call it that, but don’t blame the plant for its bad name! Alternate options include tradescantia, inch plant, or creeping jesus.

Alisa Solomon interviewed Jonathan Ned Katz about historical lesbian and radical Eve Adams for the Jewish Currents newsletter and now I am hella excited to read his new biography of Adams which includes the text of her pamphlet Lesbian Love.

Using resurrection genomics, scientists germinated ancient judean date palm seeds.

James Russel’s family retrospective includes statements like “Grandma Marguerite told me when I was very young how she used to distribute socialist newspapers in Ladino to workers at the waterfront” and “Great-grandmother Rachel was a clairvoyant and practiced magic,” as well as winemaking during prohibition and stories of how his family survived a whole series of catastrophes.

There is now a recording of a queer yiddishkeit panel i linked to but could not attend

Were you at Occupy Yom Kippur, or do you know someone who was? Jewish Currents is compiling an oral history.

Twitter’s favorite Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has a newsletter called Life is a Sacred Text, with free and paid options. It is on substack, which I do not love, but alas.

Events!

6/13 Simcha! Learning & Celebrating Queer Jewish Joy

6/13 Jews and Prison: Jewish Values Behind the Walls, presented by Elaine Leeder

6/13 From Anti-Semitism to Anti-Racism: From Antisemitism to Anti-Racism: Jewish Perspectives on Defunding the Police Subtitle was “Why Jews Should Support Defunding the Police”–unsure if the content has changed.

6/13 The Birdverse & Beyond - Author Talk with R.B. Lemberg, a wonderful queer jewish spec fic author

6/13 Jewish Federation 2021 Community Pride Seder

6/13 Original Ladino Music with Nani Noam Vazana

6/13-6/15 Kavod v’Nichum conference about jewish death practices from a non-Orthodox POV, including traditional and less-traditional tracks.

6/15 How Is Fat Liberation a Jewish Social Justice Issue?: A 20-Minute Webinar

6/15 Jewish Prayer in Many Languages: From Sephardic Seattle to Syrian Brooklyn, Part 2: Shabbat

6/15 Stories From The People: A night of LGTBQ+ Jewish History. register here.

6/15 Back to Hebrew School: Unpacking Zionism and Apartheid from IfNotNow

6/16 Hishbati David Kraemer Dis-Placing Zion: Ketubbot 110b-111a and the Claim for the Babylonian Center, registration required

6/17 Yuval Evri (King’s College London) and Angy Cohen (University of Calgary): Foreign in a familiar land: language and belonging in the work of Jacqueline Kahanoff, Albert Memmi and Jacques Derrida.

6/18 Juneteenth Kabbalat Shabbat from Bechol Lashon.

6/20 Hishbati Zackary Berger Are the Ways of Peace Enough? Jewish Autonomy, Community, and Obligation in Healthcare, registration required

6/20 JamJews Pride Fest

6/20 Pink Peacock queer midsummer party

6/23 Hishbati Reb Enn “The Glass is Half Jewish: Intermarriage and Mixed Heritage Jews”, registration required

6/27 Hishbati Everett Gendler “Confronting ‘Jewish Nationalism’: Might It be an Oxymoron?”, registration required

6/30 Hishbati Barat Ellman “Who or what is Israel?”, registration required

6/30, 7/7, 7/14 Not Your Bubbe’s Brisket: Jewish Food Past, Present, and Future With Michael Twitty sliding scale $85-$110

7/1, 7/8 The Last Days of Pompeii: A Jewish Perspective, sliding scale $36-60.

7/11 Hishbati Lina Morales “Were It Not for the Fear It Inspires: Prayers for the State and Hishtadlus”, registration required

The Jewish Pet of the Week this week is Kurt Wagner, who of course has a feline sibling named Kitty Pryde.

<3

Meli