Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza by Beinart Peter

Author:Beinart,Peter [Beinart, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS026000 HISTORY / Middle East / General
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2025-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

5

Korach’s Children

We are the children of Korach. He appears in the book of Numbers, once the Israelites’ journey through the desert has already gone seriously wrong. He assembles a band of rebels against Moses and his brother, Aaron, and accuses them of elitism. “All the community are holy, all of them, and God is in their midst,” Korach proclaims. “Why then do you raise yourselves above God’s congregation?” Moses responds by preparing a test. To see who enjoys divine favor, he offers incense to God and has the rebels do the same. God appears and the earth swallows Korach whole. Contest over.

But the question remains: What did Korach do wrong? There are many opinions. But the one that should haunt us comes from Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the iconoclastic Orthodox social critic whom the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called “the conscience of Israel.” Leibowitz focused on Korach’s use of the word “holy.” He noted that four verses earlier God had told Moses to tell the Israelites “to observe all My commandments and to be holy to your God.” Holiness was conditional; it depended on keeping the commandments. Korach, by contrast, said the Israelites were already holy. It wasn’t a standard they needed to meet. It was inherent in who they were.

What made Korach’s argument so dangerous, Leibowitz argued, was that it corrupted another key concept in the Hebrew Bible: chosenness. For Leibowitz, it was essential that being chosen by God did not make Jews better than anyone else. It meant they had a special set of obligations—to follow the Torah’s commandments—not a special set of virtues. In the Bible, the prophets do not tell the Jewish people they can do no wrong. They tell them that it is precisely because they have a unique relationship with God that their wrongs can never be excused. “You alone have I singled out of all the families of the earth,” says the prophet Amos, in God’s name. “Therefore, I will call you to account for your sins.”

But Amos wouldn’t have needed to say that had Korach’s message not been so seductive. Who wouldn’t be tempted by the claim that chosenness—sometimes called election—makes you holy no matter what? Rabbi Shai Held, a prominent contemporary theologian, notes that “the prophets were constantly forced to fight against interpretations of election that guaranteed the people impunity and rendered them impervious to critique.” Since the beginning, some Jews have wanted to place us above the law.

Leibowitz believed that Korach’s heresy echoed throughout Jewish history. He traced it through the eleventh-century Spanish poet and philosopher Yehuda Halevi, the sixteenth-century rabbi known as the Maharal of Prague, and elements of Chasidic thought that date from eighteenth-century Poland and Ukraine. Scholars can debate whether these disparate figures and movements make up a coherent ideological lineage and how much support their view has in the Torah itself. But even if Leibowitz was right that Jewish exceptionalism constituted a persistent and deviant strain in medieval and early modern Jewish thought, it couldn’t do much damage. So

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