In Israel: Koraḥ
The Whole Garment
Koraḥ is the villain of this week’s Torah reading, the leader of a foiled rebellion against Moses and Aaron. “Look, all of us are holy,” Koraḥ said to them. By this he meant that he and his family were, like Moses and Aaron, all members of the sacred tribe of Levi. As such, Koraḥ argued, they all ought to have an equal claim on the priesthood—so there was no reason for Aaron and his descendants to be the only kohanim (priests) serving in Israel’s sanctuary.
An ancient midrash connected Koraḥ’s attempted rebellion to what immediately preceded the Torah’s account of it: the law of tassels (Num 15:37-41). Midrashists sometimes asked what the connection was between two apparently unrelated items that appear one after the next in the Torah. This hermeneutical practice was called doreshin semukhin, “interpreting adjacent things.”
(Just as an aside: The classic example of this sort of reading concerns three apparently unrelated laws in Deuteronomy 21:10-21. The first law governs the conditions under which a man may marry a woman taken captive in war; the second concerns the awarding of the birthright to the firstborn when there are two firstborn sons in a polygamous marriage; the third outlines the treatment of a rebellious son who refuses to heed his parents. Why these three laws one after the next? The midrashic explanation is that if a married man takes as his second wife a woman taken captive in war, then his two wives will likely, in the course of things, have each given birth to a son—a potential cause of strife in the family, since each is a “firstborn son” to his mother—and the son who loses out on the birthright may then turn rebellious, refusing to heed his parents.)
In the case of Koraḥ, interpreters asked whether the law of tassels might have had something to do with his attempted rebellion. After all, putting tassels dyed the color tekhelet on the four corners of a garment would certainly be expensive, and Koraḥ was a rabble-rouser eager to recruit followers to his cause. An early, perhaps pre-rabbinic midrashic text called the Book of Biblical Antiquities (originally written in Hebrew, it survives only in Latin translation) thus reports that after Moses had promulgated the law of tassels, Koraḥ exclaimed, “Why is an unbearable law imposed upon us?”
A later version of this midrash goes into greater detail. According to this account, Koraḥ immediately asked Moses, “Does a garment that has already been dyed completely tekhelet still need the tekhelet-colored tassel on its four corners?” “Yes,” replied Moses. “And a room that is full of Torah scrolls—does it still need a mezuzah on the doorway?” “Yes,” Moses again answered.
It’s clear that Koraḥ was trying to impugn Moses’ authority by showing the laws he was transmitting to be illogical. After all, if seeing a single thread of the color tekhelet served to remind people of the accoutrements of the tabernacle (mishkan) and the priestly garments—and thereby led them to remember God’s holiness and to seek to be holy themselves—then surely that connection could be made far more strikingly by a garment that was entirely tekehelet-colored! Why would it need the special tassel? And if the mezuzah was intended to remind people of the Torah’s commandments, wouldn’t that act of reminding be far more striking if one were entering a room full of Torah scrolls? Would such a room still need the mezuzah at its entrance?
But there was a hidden message in these two questions. What was on Koraḥ’s mind was the special status of Aaron and his descendants. “We’re all Levites,” Koraḥ had said, and in that sense they were all equal threads in an all-tekhelet garment. If so, why single out one particular thread—Aaron and his descendants—from all the others? Similarly, if all Levites were comparable to room full of Torah scrolls, all of them containing the words of God, why should a special little parchment be singled out and put at the room’s entrance?
Perhaps this is why Koraḥ’s rebellion was viewed by the Rabbis as so insidious. He was a clever politician intent only on his own gain, but succeeded in masking his intentions and persuading other people that he was actually their representative in opposing an elite.
Shabbat shalom!
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Weekly Torah Reading: July 2, 2016
Outside Israel: Shelaḥ Lekha
Memorable Threads
This week’s Torah reading ends with the law of “fringes” or “tassels” (tzitzit). In pre-modern times, weavers used different means to finish off a piece of cloth so that it would not unravel. One way was to hem the cloth; another was to take the threads protruding from the end of the garment (technically, the warp threads) and group them together into little bunches of ornamental tassels. In Num 15:38-40, Israelites are commanded to make such tassels on the corners of their garments, and to include in the tassels a special, tekhelet-colored thread.
In biblical times, the color tekhelet (probably a kind of violet or bluish purple) was manufactured from a certain snail that was then common along the eastern Mediterranean coastline. (This particular variety of snail had long been held to be extinct, though some now claim it has been rediscovered.) The manufacturing process employed to make the tekhelet dye was time-consuming and costly; scholars have calculated that it took something like 12,000 snails to made 1.4 grams of dye. Only the very wealthy could afford a whole garment of tekhelet; perhaps for this reason people sometimes speak of the color as “royal blue.” When, in the book of Esther, the king rewards the virtuous Mordechai, the latter walks out of the palace “in royal robes of tekhelet and white.”
In this week’s reading, the Torah first commands Israelites to make the tzitzit in Numbers 15:38; then the next verse says: “And it will be a tzitzit for you [in the plural], so that when you see it you will remember all of the commandments of the Lord and do them.”
This verse raises two little questions: 1) why tell people that “it will be a tzitzit for you” when that was just mentioned in the previous verse—of course it will be a tzitzit! And 2) why should the sight of the tekhelet thread cause people to remember “all of the commandments of the Lord”? That color was certainly associated with kings and the very wealthy, but what did it have to do with remembering God’s commandments?
Actually, both questions are pretty easily answered. As to the first: the word tzitzit sounds as if it might be related to the verb hetzitz, “glance at, glimpse.” (The two words aren’t really related, but they sound as if they might be.) So the Torah seems to be saying: it’s called a tzitzit because you are supposed to catch sight of it.
As for why catching sight of the tekhelet should remind people to “remember all of the commandments of the Lord,” this has nothing to do with royalty or the very rich, but with another major consumer of tekhelet, the great temple in Jerusalem. Anyone who visited the temple was immediately struck by the festival of colors that met the eye—including, prominently, tekhelet.
Thus, the anonymous author of the Letter of Aristeas describes “all the glorious vestments,” including the tassels “of marvelous colors.” Seeing it, he said, “a man would think he had come out of this world into another.” Ben Sira, a Jewish sage of the early second century BCE, similarly remarked on the “holy garment of gold and tekhelet and purple” with which God had adorned the priesthood—“How glorious was he [the High Priest] … when he donned his glorious vestments and put on his garments of splendor.” In fact, for Philo of Alexandria and others, the priestly garments “would seem to be a likeness and copy of the universe.”
No wonder, then, that a glimpse of a single thread of tekhelet would bring to an ancient Israelite’s mind the splendor of the holiest place on earth, and that glimpse would cause him to come to his senses and remember all the commandments of the Torah.
Shabbat shalom!