Korach and his company

(Numbers 16:6)

Sivan 29, 5777/June 23, 2017

When we consider all the sundry personalities that populate the generation of the wilderness, none seems quite so familiar, quite so modern to us as Korach. He seems to have possessed all the maladies of our day. He was avaricious, egotistical, self-serving and manipulative. Unfortunately, these types are all too prevalent in our modern landscape. And possessors of these traits all seem to want the same things: power, wealth and prestige. Korach is filled with ambition and is prepared to stop at nothing to get what he wants. What he wants is the mantle of leadership over the entire nation and the crown of the High Priest. To get what he wants he takes on Moshe, Aharon, and G-d Himself, and all at the same time! This begs the question: If Korach was so ambitious, so brazen and so adept at demogoguery then why did he wait for this moment to strike? How come we have not heard his name before?

The qualities which Korach possessed, he indeed always possessed, but latently. They manifest themselves now, and overwhelm his being because of the sin of the spies and the resultant forty year sentence of homelessness in the desert. From our perspective today, the forty year desert sojourn was only a blip on the timeline. For the younger generation that would have to put their dreams on hold for another forty years before they finally entered the land of Canaan under the leadership of Yehoshua, it was a very major inconvenience in their lives. But for Korach and his generation it was an eternity. In fact, it was more than an eternity. It was never. They would never enter the land. All the promise of Torah would not be theirs. And the land itself, the promised land, the land flowing with milk and honey, the land of their forefathers, and the intrinsic holiness that that land possessed, would never be theirs.

We live in a world of time and space and Torah teaches us that both time and space possess sanctity, but not all time and all space possess the same sanctity. The Shabbat is a day hallowed above the other six days of the week. And the land of Israel possesses a sanctitiy greater than other lands, which intensifies in sanctity in the city known as Jerusalem and intensifies in sanctity even more so on Mount Moriah, the Temple Mount, the place of the Holy Temple. Man, to fully understand both his own purpose in the world and G-d's presence in the world, must be fully cognizant of both these realms of sanctity. Sanctity of time is not something that we can turn on or off as a light switch and sanctity of place is not a carry-on that we can store overhead and take out at our convenience. They both require our presence, temporal and physical, in the time and place determined by G-d.

Modern man has long lost touch with the sanctity of place. In the world of easy mobility, open skies and open borders, limitless cyberspace, mass migrations and refugee crises, man has literally become a rootless being. He is no longer connected physically or metaphysically, to locale. Our earth, the one G-d created on day one, has become incidental to our everyday existence. And the earth itself has become a victim of our rootlessness. Shall we save it or shall we trash it? That we even possess such a choice is terrifying and the fact that rootless, spiritually homeless people, people who have no concept of the sanctity possessed within our earth by virtue of G-d's will, are the ones deciding the fate of our world, is even more chilling.

The nation of Israel struggled for two thousand years of exile from her land with the existentially crippling reality of being disconnected from her ancestral homeland and the holiness possessed by that land. By virtue of her people's steadfast adherence to Torah, their covenant with G-d, and their constant longing for the promised land of Israel and the holy city of Jerusalem, the eternal nation of Israel has, at long last, traversed the wilderness of time and returned to her holy places.

Korach didn't have that chance, nor did he have the capacity to entrust his fate to the passage of time and the coming generations. For him the loss of the sacntity of space, of the ability to live in a land where he can see and hear and touch G-d's intangible presence, was fatal. And so it is for all mankind. We may imagine that we are too sophisticated, too cosmopolitan to "believe" in the sanctity of place. We may think such a "belief" is primitive. But it's not a belief. It is a reality, which we can embrace and by doing so, give our souls a measure of peace, or reject, and be doing so, following the directionless path of Korach.

It is no coincidence that Korach's fate was to be swallowed up alive by the earth and to be held prisoner there forever, neither dead nor alive. He rejected the sanctity of place when he turned his back on the land of Israel, and so the earth rejected him. He neither sees the heavens above nor feels the earth's embrace. Modern man, too, is heading for this place that is no place, this nether place of no sanctity. Jerusalem and the Holy Temple that stands atop its hill is both the House of G-d and the gathering place for all mankind, a supremely sanctified place in time and space where rootlessness ends and man finds a home.

-The Temple Institute