Not Taking or Creating Sides and Speaking up Against Injustice

Torah at the Intersection/ Korach

What did Korach take?

Rav Lachem- you have gone too far!!

With these words, Korach, the namesake and protagonist of this week's Torah story, challenges the political/spiritual leadership and the entire caste system of the Israelites that has been established in hiddenness.

Is Korach's rebellion a righteous call for a system with greater transparency and access to power and resources? After all, the significant decisions affecting the Israelites and the great decisionmaker are hidden behind veils of clouds, hidden on mountains. A basic principle of Nonviolent Communication is that we advocate for systems that are based on the principle of everyone having a voice and being represented in decisions that affect them. This is the antidote to the domination system of pharaoh.

And yet, Torah condemns Korach's rebellion in dramatic storytelling. The Hiddenness causes the Earth to open up beneath the rebels and swallow them. Hiddenness reveals itself by inflicting another plague on the faction of the priestly leadership for dividing the people in the interest of their own greed and jealousy. The rebellion represents a spiritual sickness, one that is permeated with greed and jealousy, taking and dividing for its own sake, completely out of integrity with the vision of wholeness and transformation from the system of enslavement and domination.

Hiddenness calls us to look deeply to see for ourselves the values that underlie any rebellion. Is it rebellion just for the sake of "shaking things up" in a way that reinforces the domination and supremacy of one group over another? Or is there a deeper transformation, one that starts from the principle of everyone belonging and including everyone’s voice? This is what Torah models at the end of the story this week. The Mystery sends out Aaron's son Eliezer, the future of the spiritual/political leadership, to literally forge together into the altar the hopes and dreams of everyone affected by the rebellion.

Not through the division and taking that Korach represents, but by weaving together everyone's needs, wholeness is restored to the moveable sanctuary within our own hearts, at the heart of the journey through the desert and into the promised land.

This is all the subject of this week's video and the practice below. In this time of great division among the people here in the US, among the Jewish people, among the peoples of the world, let us unite around the understanding that our futures, our freedom and our safety are completely intertwined.

Practice: Transforming Fear/ Our Inner Korach

Principle from Nonviolent Communication: Our fundamental Needs are Never in conflict. Only the Strategies we Employ to Meet the Needs

How can we overcome the fear that generates our patterns of taking and dividing? Nonviolent Communication offers a practice where we make peace within ourselves so that we have a vision and process to bring more peace and justice into the world.

Think of a situation in which you see in yourself the tendency to create an “us versus them” frame. A situation where you believe that you, or one set of your needs, are in conflict to others’ needs. This could be within yourself, your own family, society or any place where you interact with others.

First identify the needs of yours, what you want more of in the world, that you are valuing and attempting to meet by thinking this way. Note that by "needs" we are talking about these fundamental universal pathways to the fullness of life: Use the Needs section of this chart to find up to five needs.

Now think of what you would like to do, or have someone else do, to meet these needs. These are the strategies you would like employed to meet your needs. Write down at least two strategies for each of the needs that you have identified.

Now, and this could be more challenging, imagine the needs of the other person or part of yourself that wouldn't be met by employing any of your preferred strategies. Use the chart again! Allow identifying this other set of needs to enter your own being.

Can you see that the conflict is not about the needs themselves but rather about the strategies you would like employed to meet the needs? You might even be seeing that your needs and the other person's needs are actually the same.

If it's hard for you to see that, note that there is always more than one strategy to meet every need. Now use your creativity to imagine possible strategies that would meet everyone's needs. Write down at least two strategies that are your attempt to weave together all the values and needs at play in this situation. Just as the young priest Eliezer did.

What changes for you doing this process?

The Inspiration for the Title of this Weeks’ Essay

The Tenth Mindfulness Training: Protecting and Nourishing the Sangha (Community)

Aware that the essence and aim of a Sangha is the practice of understanding and compassion, we are determined not to use the Buddhist community for personal power or profit, or transform our community into a political instrument. As members of a spiritual community, we should nonetheless take a clear stand against oppression and injustice. We should strive to change the situation, without taking sides in a conflict. We are committed to learning to look with the eyes of interbeing and to see ourselves and others as cells in one Sangha body. As a true cell in the Sangha body, generating mindfulness, concentration, and insight to nourish ourselves and the whole community, each of us is at the same time a cell in the Buddha body. We will actively build brotherhood and sisterhood, flow as a river, and practice to develop the three real powers – understanding, love, and cutting through afflictions – to realise collective awakening.
Plum Village/Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings

Bonus Teaching from Rabbi Art Green:

“…it is worth recalling that the Korah story is all about greed. It is especially seen as the tale of a wealthy man who endlessly wants yet more. He even uses the populist argument ("Are not all of God's people holy?") to advance his cause.

Shabbat Korah should be a time to think about greed, the most dangerous sin of our times, and to stand up against it. Greed for money, for land, for power. They are all the same sin and they are behind many of the most disturbing headlines of our day. Will our planet's future be destroyed by the greed of oil and gas companies and their investors? Will Artificial Intelligence be created in destructive ways for humanity because of the greed of Silicon Valley? Will the man in the White House sell us out due to his endless greed for money? Will Israel wind up destroying itself because of greed for Palestinian land?

״איזה הוא עשיר? השמח בחלקו.״"

"Who is wealthy?" our sages ask. "The one who finds joy in what he has."

Previous Essays on Korach from Torah at the Intersection:

Korach/Leading from Wholeness
Korach/Leading Us out of Trauma Responses