A word of Torah:
In this week’s Torah portion, Korah challenges the leadership of Moses by accusing him of acquiring too much power and of displaying haughtiness toward the people of Israel. Korah begins his accusation by comparing what Moses has to what Korah has, or doesn’t have. He wonders why Moses and his brother Aaron hold both of the leadership positions. Here he falls into a trap that the Ten Commandments understands:
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house…or anything that is your neighbor’s (Ex. 20:14). The language of this commandment suggests that coveting comes from envy, from the constant need to compare yourself to others. The 19th century rabbinic scholar Samson Raphael Hirsch maintained that desire for more is not intrinsically a bad thing. What is problematic is unrestrained yearnings. As he wrote: “Unspeakably frightful are the consequences of ta’avah (desire) when it exceeds the bounds of the necessary and good. It destroys all happiness in life…What you have has no value for you; only what is not yet yours attracts you, and this, too, loses its value on being acquired….” (Horeb “Covetousness,” pp. 43-46 excerpted). Envy and arrogance rest on engaging in the comparison game, which becomes a never-ending enterprise.
The second accusation seems particularly odd because only a few chapters ago the Torah described Moses as “the humblest person in the world (Num. 12:3).” Humility is not a popular concept in the modern world. It can be understood as an excuse to accept the status quo. It is often dismissed as false. Most importantly it runs counter to the modern value of the empowerment of individuals to shape their destiny.
In her commentary on Korah, Dena Weiss of Hadar writes that “rather than compare yourself to other people, you should compare yourself to yourself. You assess what your abilities are…and you work hard on doing what you know you can and what you know you should. The race you run is against yourself.”
Humility calls for an accurate assessment of ourselves both in our good qualities and in our challenging ones. The near enemy of humility is a sense of being unworthy which prevents us from realizing what we are capable of doing. Moses was the humblest person not because he thought he was nothing, but because he understood that he was actually something. Right from the burning bush he is the model of a leader who leads with reluctance, which derives from the trait of humility. As we have seen so much in recent times, the single most important quality of leadership has to do with character, which Moses has and Korah lacks.
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