Korach: An End to Envy

I’ll share with you a rather extreme statement by an insightful, albeit unusual, rabbinic thinker of the early twentieth century, Rabbi Aharon Shmuel Tameres, in a book he published in Warsaw, 1920. He wrote:

“Briefly stated, war is the idolatry of modernity, which, as it progressed intellectually, retained war as a remnant from all other foolish idolatries.”

Harsh words, but words which command our attention.

Allow me to soften the message significantly with an anecdote that I’ve come to cherish. It is an anecdote I was privileged to hear from several eyewitnesses, all Holocaust survivors.

They were all young yeshiva students at the time, in the months immediately after Hitler’s invasion of Poland in late 1939. The Modzitzer Rebbe, Rabbi Shaul Yedidyah Elazar Taub, had the foresight to immediately flee his home and Chassidic court in Poland. He convinced several others to join him, among them some of his family, including some of his children (including my dear father-in-law, Rabbi Chaim Yitzchak Taub).

The group escaped Poland, avoiding Nazi airplanes flying overhead and setting fire from the air to Jewish homes and synagogues. They made their way into Lithuania, then safe, and spent time in Litvishe towns, including Kovno, and eventually Vilna.

There, with the encouragement of the de facto leader of the community, Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinsky, he was able to find refuge for himself and his entourage, and to conduct Chassidic services, including a tisch, or informal Shabbat festive meal, attended by the local yeshiva students, of whom many were themselves refugees.

The custom at such events was for the Rebbe to distribute small portions of his food to all in attendance. These small servings were symbolic “leftovers” from the Rebbe’s own serving. In Yiddish, “leftovers” are called “shirayim”.

The young students, who enjoyed the Rebbe’s songs and melodies and who were hypnotized by his brief but brilliant Torah sermons, were, to say the least, unaccustomed to eating the leftovers/shirayim from the rebbe’s plate. Many of them declined the honor, and many laughed scoffingly at this “primitive” custom.

The Rebbe calmed them down and gently explained: “Shirayim are not a laughing matter. They teach an important lesson. Had Hitler learned that lesson, I would not be here today. I would still be at home with my Chassidim in Poland.”

“For,” he continued, “shiryaim teach us the lesson of not wanting everything for oneself, of leaving something over for the other person. Imagine if Hitler had kept to his own domain and left the rest of us to our own countries.”

He then continued, or so I was told, with a longer explanation of kin’ah, envy. First, he defined envy as desiring an object that belongs to another, of not being satisfied with one’s own possessions, but longing and plotting to obtain it from one’s fellow one way or another. That is kin’ah.

In that context, he quoted two verses, one biblical and the other Mishnaic:

1. “…For love is as powerful as death itself, and envy [kin’ah] as unyielding as She’ol (the netherworld). (Song of Songs/Shir HaShirim 8:6)
2. “Rabbi Elazar HaKappar said: ‘Envy [kin’ah], lust, and the seeking of honor drive a person out of the world.’” (Ethics of the Fathers/Pirkei Avot 4:28)

I know not how the Rebbe expounded those powerful condemnations of envy, kin’ah. But I do know of quite a few biblical and historical characters who were envious and for whom envy/kin’ah was their downfall.

One was the central character of this week’s Torah portion after whom the parsha is named—Korach (Numbers 16:1-18:32).

Korach was the epitome of a man who had everything. Tradition has it that he was very wealthy. He had a wife and family, sons who went on to future honor after their father met his wretched fate. As a member of the tribe of Levi, he had opportunities for leadership and even for the performance of sacred functions.

Yet he was envious of Moshe and Aharon and persuaded others to become sufficiently envious to join him in his ill-fated and blasphemous rebellion.

It is noteworthy that, as pointed out by the author of Tosefet Yom Tov, there is a passage in a commentary attributed to Rashi in which Korach is designated as the very archetype of envy, as the exemplary of the nasty trait of kin’ah!

How does one overcome envy? One very creative and psychologically astute approach is offered by Rabbi Baruch Epstein, the early twentieth century author of Torah Temimah, in his commentary to the verse in Shir HaShirim quoted above.

There, love is described as very powerful and envy as ultimately disastrous. Rabbi Epstein sees this connection in the text: When two individuals truly love each other, they will never envy each other. The more love, the less envy.

I recommend that the reader consult Rabbi Epstein’s own words and his examples in his commentary found after the Pentateuch section of Chumash Vayikra.

Allow me to express a bit of my own limited creativity. In an attempt to find some themes common to last week’s parsha, Shelach, and this week’s Korach, I recalled that last week the Torah reading concluded with the mitzvah of tzitzit, fringes to be tied onto the corners of one’s four-cornered garment. Among those fringes was to be attached tekhelet, a cord of blue.

What immediately came to my mind was that Korach is said to have mocked Moshe with silly halachic questions, one of which was whether an entire garment composed of tekhelet, blue material, would require blue fringes.

Apparently, Korach’s psyche, suffused with envy, could not be satisfied with just a few strands of blue cords. He was after much more. Entire garments of blue would not quench his thirst for it all. Envy does not allow one to be satisfied with only a sample of totality. The envious person wants it all.

But I have another connection to tekhelet, besides the fact that I’ve carefully included blue cords in my own personal tallitot for many years. That is the Talmudic passage which reads:

“Why blue rather than any of the other colors? Because blue calls to mind the color of the sea, and the sea is the color of the heavens, and the heavens resemble the Lord’s Throne of Glory, of which it is said (Exodus 24:10): ‘…and beneath His feet what looked like a lapis lazuli pavement as clear as the sky itself.’” (Talmud Bavli Menuchot 44b)

Just a strand or two of the blue cords of tekhelet coupled with a dose of inner reflection and spirited imagination brings us, step by step, away from our self-centered envy toward the “feet” of the Master of the Universe.

But envy? Not blue. William Shakespeare knew well that green is the color of envy. In the play Othello, Iago warns Othello about the dangers of envy calling envy a “green-eyed monster”!

Be not green with envy. Blue tekhelet conquers green envy at every turn.