Korach and Jewish Lessons on Leadership

The rebels clearly had a good communications consultant. In their charge, they are invoking the spirit of something God says about the Israelites in Exodus19:6 (Parashat Yitro) when God calls them a mamlechet kohanim v’goy kadosh, “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”. Right on the heels of the giving of the Ten Commandments, the Israelites are told that they share the special status of priesthood. It is not the province of any one person or small class of Israelites.

This is neither the first nor the last uprising Moses faces from the people that he is trying to lead. He invites Korach to show up at the Tent of Meeting with fire pans and incense, a test to prove whose offering will be accepted by God.  Moses then predicts that if the rebels die an unnatural death, it is a sign that they are rebelling against God’s wishes.

And, sure enough, in v.32, the ground opens up and swallows up Korach, Datan, Abiram and 250 of their followers. Soon thereafter, a plague strikes the community and another 14,700 perish (Numbers 17:11-15), individuals identified by later rabbinic commentators as “supporters of the rebellion”.

Full disclosure: I am not a fundamentalist. I do not take every story from the Bible as literally true. The Masorites, who committed the oral history of Israel to writing, had an agenda in terms of how they recounted incidents that may well have been based on actual events. That agenda was to give testimony to the power of Israel’s God, as compared to the deities worshipped by other nations at the time.

What I find most important in Biblical stories is not the literal details, but how the rabbis of later generations interpret the text. It is here that we begin to understand the lessons the rabbis derived from the Korach story about the nature of leadership.

Rashi, the 11^th century Biblical commentator from France, gives several examples of how Moses does all he can to reconcile with the rebels. In Numbers16:12, Moses invites Dathan and Abiram to come and speak with him, but they refuse. We learn from this that leaders need to be patient with dissenters. Perhaps they have legitimate reasons to rebel. If there is a way to resolve a dispute peacefully, that should be the first recourse.

In Numbers Rabbah (12^th century Europe), the rabbis identify Korah as a classic demagogue. He says to the people that the tithes that Moses exacts are more burdensome than the situation of the Hebrews as slaves under Pharoah. But that is a partial truth. The tithes went to support the work of the Levites who oversaw the ritual practice at the Tabernacle in the desert. The funds also went to support the impoverished, providing them with food and shelter. Using partial truths and misinformation has been part of the authoritarian playbook from the dawn of time.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who served as the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom from 1991-2013, contrasts Korah’s self-serving attempt to overthrow Moses with Moses’s, lifelong, humble manner. The term most often used for Moses is eved Hashem, “a servant of God”.  “Leadership is not a matter of status, it is a matter of function” wrote Sacks. It is another way to ask the question: What are you going to do with the office that you are privileged to hold?

It is instructive to compare Moses, the “servant of God,” to the teachings of Robert Greenleaf. A highly respected 20^th cent leadership coach who came to be known for his 1970 book, The Servant as Leader, Greenleaf wrote: “The servant-leader is servant first… A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong.” 

What a valuable and instructive comment! It flies in the face of so much of what is currently being demonstrated by so many “leaders” of the free world. I shudder at what this generation will take away from the presidency of Donald Trump. From a Jewish values perspective, he is the exact opposite of how the rabbis described leadership.  He has made the U.S. Presidency all about himself, putting his name on our currency, our cultural institutions, hanging 3-story high pictures of himself on select Federal office buildings, and using his office to enrich himself, his family and his allies.

All the rabbinic commentaries on Korah make the distinction between leadership as narcissism vs leadership as “service to others and to the community”.

What does “servant leadership” look like in the contemporary world? Here is one, powerful example. In March 2013, two weeks after being elected, Pope Francis chose to mark his new leadership role by going to a prison to wash the feet of several prisoners, some of whom were women and some of whom were not even Christian. It shocked Vatican traditionalists by departing so sharply from the practices of previous Popes. It was meant to signal that Francis’ Papacy would be dedicated to lifting up the most marginalized people in society. I still remember feeling goosebumps when, more than ten years ago, I read that story in the morning newspaper.

I have a fantasy that our next U.S. President, in atonement for the behavior of our current President, will go to an ICE Detention Center, sign a blanket pardon for the tens of thousands of people incarcerated by ICE all over America, and symbolically unlock the prison doors, as he asks forgiveness for a country that has lost its way.

That would be true leadership, in keeping with the lessons of this week’s parsha of Korach.