Temper Tantrums

Parashat Korach is alarmingly relevant this year. It reminded me of a recent post by Heather Cox Richardson that was a straight news summary, no interpretation or quotes by external sources, and yet the whole thing came across as too outrageous to be anything but a satire.

I'm probably thinking of HCR (and if you aren't a fan, I'll happily wait right here while you go sign up for her substack and read 10 or 20 of her daily posts) because from 2020 to 2024, one of her refrains was "Blocking things is easy. Building things is hard work." It's a lesson that Korach and his sons and their 250 followers seem not to have learned.

I mean, Korach has a point. Twelve spies were sent into the land, and ten came back with negative reports. Sure, the land flowed with milk and honey. Sure, there were grapes the size of bowling balls. But there were giants who didn't seem friendly, who made them feel like grasshoppers. "Let's not go," they said. "We're going," Moses said.

So, yeah, Korach doesn't feel like he has much of a voice. And he's supposed to have a voice, because he's from the Tribe of Levi. So we have to reflect when he says, "You have gone too far! All the community is holy, and God dwells in our midst. Why then do you raise yourself above God's congregation?"

But what Korach doesn't have is a plan. The Israelites left Egypt a couple of years before. They have been on a path to Eretz Israel that is clearly favored by God, since they are guided by pillars of cloud and fire. If you're going to veer from a course that well defined, that clearly outlined, you'd better not complain until you have some good alternatives. Even a few recommendations would be welcome: Can we send out more spies in more directions and see if there are some good alternatives that we're currently not aware of? If so, could we bargain with God for a change in plans? God often seems amenable to alternatives that save innocent lives.

But no. Korach's feelings are hurt. His real gripe is that God likes Moses best, even though Moses is a second son with difficulty speaking. Korach doesn't even bother to present the context for his complaint, let alone a workable compromise.

Moses does the rational thing. He points out, correctly, that Korach's problem isn't with him, the second-born son. It's with Aaron, the chief priest selected from his own tribe. That works as well as rational responses to childish tantrums usually do.

Moses gives up on Korach. He goes to the other two leaders of the rebellion. No help there. They simply trot out the tired old "why did you make us leave Egypt?" complaint, now followed by, "you're not the boss of us!" (Surely they added "nyah nyah nyah," and it was redacted by the editors.)

Bless his heart, Moses doesn't argue. I would have. I would have pointed out that even if what they say about their life in Egypt were true (narrator's voice: "It isn't true.") going back to Egypt at this point would invite even worse treatment by the Pharoah than they'd previously experienced.

And that's leaving out the part about challenging God.

Moses just tells them that, if they want to challenge Aaron, they are welcome to do so.

"But if יהוה brings about something unheard-of, so that the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, you shall know that those involved have spurned יהוה," he says. The verse could perhaps be summarized as "fafo."

And the results are predictably disastrous. All the rebels are killed on the spot, along with their families. But do the Israelites learn? No, indeed. They double down, blaming Moses and Aaron, not the rebels, for God's wrath.

Sigh.

As I write this, a 900-page tax bill is being read aloud on the floor of the Senate. It is being read aloud mainly to prevent the vote from occurring in the dark of a weekend night, away from the prying eyes of news media.

The bill contains lots of provisions that are wildly unpopular. It will strip healthcare from millions. It will allocate more money to finding and deporting undocumented immigrants than is currently budgeted for our entire prison system. It cuts money for emergency management.

Whitehouse.gov promises that passage of the bill will return us to a land of milk and honey.

Safe towns. Strong borders. Proud country.

Under President Trump, our communities are protected again.

The One Big Beautiful Bill delivers real border security—millions deported, thousands of new agents, and the wall completed.

We'll spend billions hunting down the people who harvest our crops and package our meat and literally put roofs over our heads. We'll increase our deficit. We'll flirt with additional pandemics.

We won't entertain solutions like year-round work permits or tax increases that the rich wouldn't even notice. We can't even agree to remove thimerosal from measles vaccines, because it was never there to begin with.

But we no longer believe that these actions will cause the earth to swallow us up or mighty fires to erupt.

Right?