(photo by the family of the author)
First of all, on a note related to my theme this week, let me sing out for another blog post I really think everyone should read - and, as a Canadian, thank you for indulging a moment of pride in my PM.
Now, on to our Torah. In which, this week, a group of rebels questioning Moses' and Aaron's leadership get swallowed up by the earth. Which is a pretty dramatic condemnation. So let us ask, what is it about the behavior in this week's scriptural story that is so destructive? What must one avoid?
It cannot be Korach's assertion that "the whole people is holy and imbued with the divine." (Numbers 16:3) Many are the commentators who observe that Korach, the leader of the discontented faction, is completely right in that regard.
Korach's sin seems rather to be a failure to exult in exactly that amazing state - a failure to enjoy the blessing, even as he proclaims it.
Instead of cherishing an enormous gift - and despite his own words, which correctly observe a blessing beyond all measure - Korach seems unable to stop wishing for different circumstances. One might even say that Korach's sin is one of mood. He decries the less than fullness of his cup even as it overflows.
Blessings come as they come and when they come. It does no good to wish that they had come in other circumstances or in other times. The great work of life is to recognize blessings and to weave more blessings from them. The great hazard is to waste a life despising blessings because they come with challenges or come not quite as one might imagine the blessed states enjoyed by others elsewhere.
This is not only a fault of Korach. It is a way the world can be for us in its worst moments - in our worst moments. It is God, too, in this week's reading, lashing out in wrath at imperfection, threatening to destroy the people who, whatever their failings, have followed with trust and love into the wilderness.
"Quick," says Moses to Aaron, "get a fire-pan, and fire from the altar, and place incense on it, and stand amid the people!"
"A tzorn iz aroysgegangen fun for Got."
That is how the Yiddish translation of the Torah renders Moses' explanation of the sudden devastation that ravages the camp, as the divine fury that ends the rebellion threatens to engulf the entire people. What has "flowed out from the divine" in this translation of the "wrath" in Numbers 16:46? A tzorn - a Korach-like distemper, a rejecting impulse, a spurning of the good.
So Aaron stands between the living and the dead, with the smoke of incense rising from his fire-pan, and the plague is stopped.
What is it about incense? "Matkin ve-kashir keshirin ve-avid nehiru yatir mi-kola," says the Zohar in its Aramaic. "Incense repairs and binds together and makes radiance more than any other substance." "Ve-chola itnahir ve-itatkan ve-itkasher ke-chada" - "so that all is illumined and repaired and bound together as one." The sweetness of incense pervades and unites, it purifies the innermost sanctuary of this world from ill and from fragmentation, so that the highest blessings can flow in. Like the perfumes of lovers, incense suggests togetherness, acceptance and receptivity, as an alternative to scorn.
"Kach lecha" - "Take for yourself," God says in the Torah, concerning the spices for the incense (Exodus 30:34); "le-hana'atcha" - "for your own benefit," rabbinic Midrash elaborates, "for your own enjoyment and for your own good." Incense begins with recognition of the beneficial. The inception of incense is an embrace of the good that is for one's own good. 'Take these sweet-scented elements to yourself,' God seems to say, 'so that more and more good can flow to you.'
How wrong it would be to refuse such blessing because the perfect spices come piecemeal and in raw form, because some careful and discerning work is required to combine and refine them into incense. "Hadek heitev, heitev hadek," the High Priest would say while pounding the ingredients - "refine them well, refine them well" - "because such a sound," says the Mishnah, the intonation of that refining intention, "is beneficial for the spices." (Mishnah Yoma 4:5)
I think of Aaron, standing between the dead and the living with the smoke of incense rising from his fire-pan, twisted corpses of rejected possibility all around him. That wreck and wasteful disregard of blessing, the image seems to say, was then, and is to be no more.
From this point on, beauty.