Korach

Leadership Battles in Life, Torah

By YOSEF I. ABRAMOWITZ

In a biting and perhaps ironic alignment of Torah and public Jewish life, Yosef I. Abramowitz writes, we read Parashat Korach as three contemporary rebellions came to a climax in contested Jewish leadership battles.

Authority Figures Versus Dissent: What the Torah has to Say

By JACK SILVER

The Torah tells us about norms about legitimate dissent and authority’s reasonable response to it. Jack Silver, a certified Madrikh and rabbinical student at the International Institute of Secular Humanistic Judaism, relates this week’s parashat to examples from the Torah when God is angered by the excessive use of violence instead of reasoned debate and due process. Applying the lessons to today, we have to keep an idea on dissent, authority’s response to it, and standing with the aggrieved party.

Korach Was Not the Thomas Jefferson of his Time:
Standing Up for Equality Versus Unearned Holiness

By BRENT CHAIM SPODEK

Unlike America’s Founding Fathers, who strived for equality for all and fought a revolution to ensure those unalienable egalitarian rights, Korach’s rebellion was based on complacency and a lack of vision. Brent Chaim Spodek, while a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, compared the two rebellions and points out how holiness is a goal and a beacon, not an unearned prize.

Institutionalizing Freedom

By NINA WOUK

Any nation or movement that hopes to work for and sustain freedom must create coalitions based on people’s real priorities rather than around an assumed unity. But then it must have a program, one which encompasses more than protest.