Talkin' bout a revolution: Tracy Chapman's Torah insight
Hey, it’s a holiday weekend. What better way to celebrate than right here with us at TGH, catching up with some recent posts?
As you enjoy your barbecues, your fireworks, your existential contemplations of human liberty, remember that freedom comes with Torah. And America comes with Hollywood! So make it a TGH weekend. Mr. TGH — and his uncle Sam — would sure like it that way.
Now we got some revoltin’ to get to.
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Any one of us who's ever questioned the status quo — who's asked why we celebrate mediocrity in our political systems, who's tried to think innovatively in our education spaces, who's come to that work meeting and asked what happened to that cake we were promised — can relate to this week's Torah portion.
We are the dreamers, the rebels, the revolutionaries, and thus we identify with the people in Parshat Korach.
Unfortunately, the people we're identifying with are the villains.
Korach and his 250 followers, along with Datan and Abiram, ask some of these very contrarian questions to kick off the proceedings in this week’s portion. And they're exactly the ones who, like the genial street-corner bystander in a monster movie, don't even make it to the end of the first act. They are, respectively, zapped by a fire and swallowed up by the earth — exactly the kind of fate that befalls those characters in monster movies. Not exactly vaunted for their actions.
This might land a little awkwardly with us. Or at least it does for me. Isn't resisting the uncomfortable status quo not only a fit with our modern sensibilities but an ideal conveyed by the Torah itself? Abraham leaving his idolatrous hometown, Jacob shaking off the yoke of Laban, Gideon pushing back against the military and cultural oppression of Midian, the Israelites resisting the tyranny of Egypt — the text seems to never miss an opportunity to champion the very mindset that Korach's 250 and Datan-Abiram hold here.
Challenging the authority figures who would keep them down seems like an ideal; raising questions about political leadership is baked in to the all the Torah words we read elsewhere.
And yet, the minute it happens, "Va'yishmah Moshe va'yi'pol al panav" (Moses, basically, facepalmed when he heard Korach) and "Va'yichar l'moshe me'od" (Moses got very angry when he heard Datan and Abiram's complaint). God wasn't much more tickled.
So, what's wrong with wanting more than the status quo? What's the problem with a movement of political dissent to achieve it? If one early-Israelite contribution to the ancient Near East was modeling revolution, why is this particular revolt so bad?
Let's dive a little deeper into what exactly they were rebelling against to try to make sense of it.
Korach's Levites and Data-Abiram's Reubenites actually are upset by and want rather different things when they stand up to Israelite leadership at the beginning of Chapter 16. Yet both are equally condemned.
First, Korach and his people. "Rav lachem ki kol ha'eidah kulam k'doshim u'b'tocham Hashem, u' madua titnas'u al k'hal Hashem." "It's abundant(ly clear) to you that the whole sect is holy and with God among it, why do you rule over a community of God,” they say to Moses.
This is, at bottom, a religious-calling complaint. Korach is a Levite, like Moses, his cousin. He already gets to serve in the Tabernacle. But he is not a Priest — he is not Aaron's immediate family — and thus feels shortchanged. We are all holy, how come you get to do more? (Think a Joseph's-brothers jealousy vibe — yeah, we're from the same blessed family, but how come you get to be a little more blessed than the rest of us?)
Datan-Abiram have a bit of a different grievance. They are just run-of-the-mill Israelites, not chosen for any special spiritual service. But they feel they've been promised a land flowing with milk and honey — made a campaign promise, as it were, by their leaders. "Ha'me'at ki he'elitanu mei'eretz zavat chalav u'dvash la'hamiteinu ba'midbar ki histarer aleinu gam histarer?" they ask. Is it not enough that you brought us up from a land flowing with milk and honey [Egypt] to have us die in the desert, and now you're also ruling over us?
They were promised the everyman's every-politician's promise: you'll be in a better situation under my leadership. And yet it hasn't happened. Instead of milk and honey, all they see is endless sand. The Egypt they left (in that nostalgic haze brought on by tough times) had the bounty. And now it's gone. So bring it back, they ask Moses. The current situation is rocky. And we made a major change, on your word, to achieve it.
What makes our portion’s two authority-challenges so bad — what in fact unites them in their badness — I think can be read in an unexpected but very particular linguistic theme: the use of volume and amounts. "Rav lachem," Korach and his people say — it is abundant to you. "Ha'me'at mikem," is it not enough [that you took us out of Egypt], Datan-Abiram are complaining. This it not just a questioning of the status quo. It is not even an expression of greater aspirations. It is a fundamental dissatisfaction in one's lot; it is a comparative between the plenty they have and the more they think they're owed.
This is not, in other words, simply an act of political questioning — it is a sin of rank greed.
As it happens, Moses’ response confirms this theory. Because look what he says to Korach:
In 16:9 — "Rav lachem b'nei Levi. Ha'm'at me'kem ki hivdil elohei yisrael etechem me'adat yisrael l'hakriv ethchem eilav la'avod et mishkan Hashem? — "You've got so much, Levites," he says, "Is it not enough for you that the Israelite God separated you from the larger Israelite population to bring you closer to Him and his work in his Tabernacle?"
“Rav lachem, ha'me'at mikem” — you have so much, is it not enough. Moses astutely picks up on the psychological dimension of their words and responds accordingly. You don't think you have enough. And look at all you have.
It is a fascinating conversation, layered in subtext. Yes, on the surface you are challenging authority. But I know what really animates your complaint, Moses signals back, in a deft demonstration of his maturation as a leader. You're grabby, grubby, wrongly feeling sorry for yourself, given a gift and wanting two. This looks like a set of political disagreements. But beneath the surface is a language of entitlement, problematic in any context but especially problematic given how much they have — especially problematic given how much Moses has already given them.
And so Moses calls them out on it. You are cloaking your words in political garb. You are making it seem, with your spirited rhetoric and band of followers, like you’re brave non-conformists. But what you’re really doing is acting selfishly and ungratefully. All that your forefathers legitimately revolted to achieve you already have.
The punishment now seems fitting too. I always wondered why Datan and Abiram were swallowed up by the earth. What purpose did it serve when all other instant-zap deaths the Bible has previously meted out, from public stoning on down, are presumably available? But in this analysis it all makes sense. If their sin is a grab above their gifted status, then what better way to highlight their wrongness than by bringing them literally low? If their error was an attempt to ungratefully reach beyond their free soil for some mythic milk-and-honey, then what more apt punishment than having that very ground betray them? Data and Abiram’s sin wasn’t a political act, and so it didn’t require a legalistic punishment. It was an existential reach. And so they are paid back with an existential sinking. (Incidentally, the Korach 250’s ritual death by fire has a poetic symbolism too, paralleling that of Aaron’s wayward sons whose status they so badly coveted.)
I think this greed element provides a pretty good differentiation from those pushbacks that come elsewhere in the Torah. But it turns out there might be an even sharper distinction between the rebels of our portion and the revolutionaries of other passages. Because, maybe, the two words do not mean the same thing.
Erich Fromm, the German-Jewish psychologist and thinker, actually distinguishes between precisely these — between rebels and revolutionaries. The latter, he says, are idealists, purpose-driven, overthrowing the system for a reason. The former are kneejerk, empty-headed, disruptors for disruption's sake. They want power just because it’s attractive, not for any larger good. And needless to say these two are not the same in moral value.
The late rabbi and academic Norman Lamm invokes Fromm’s distinction to explain what makes Korach and Datan-Abiram different from other Biblical figures — they were rebels, not revolutionaries. It is a difference not in means but in motive: to what end are they trying to upset the status quo? Is there a mission of social or spiritual good? Or just a general selfishness and malcontentment? “The mood of the revolutionary character is authentic,” Lamm writes. But where it comes to rebels like Korach and Datan-Abiram, “No ideals or principles or ideologies informed their treachery. They lusted for power directly and without inhibition.”
This template I think becomes especially clear via, of all things, two radio hits from the 1980’s. (Casey Kasem always knows.)
In his 1985 midtempo rocker “Rebels,” Tom Petty sings in the first person of a character who doesn’t seem to be thinking much about others, just pushing back against authority for its own sake. There’s been a lot of debate, among 80’s pop-radio rishonim, over whether or not exactly Petty is glorifying this character. But it sure seems like the empty-headed kneejerkiness of Korach and Datan-Abiram.
“Honey don't walk out/I'm too drunk to follow,” the character tells his girlfriend. “You know you won't feel this way tomorrow/Well, maybe I'm a little rough around the edges/Inside a little hollow/I get faced with some things sometimes/That are so hard to swallow….I was born a rebel.”
Contrast this with a Tracy Chapman song from just a short while after, also pushing back against authority and the status quo, only for a different reason. “It sounds like a whisper/Poor people gonna rise up/And get their share/Poor people gonna rise up/And take what's theirs.” It is, at heart, the righteous ideals of the Israelites trying to throw off the yoke of slavery, along with so many other noble quests of the Bible.
The title of Chapman’s song? “Talkin' Bout a Revolution.” The good R word.
(Btw, for pure amusement about the value of emptily rebelling look no further than the great gaonic scholar Monty Python, which in the 1979 satire Life of Brian has the unlikely titular rebel worshipped by a mob he doesn’t think should be worshipping him. “You don’t need to follow me; you don’t need to follow anyone,” he calls out to the hordes below his balcony. “You’re all individuals.” To which they all respond as one: “We are all individuals.” (A lone voice calls out from the side: “I’m not.”))
OK, so you didn’t think we’d ignore the obvious parallel, did you? It’s Fourth of July weekend, and so revolution is on our minds, along with the idea of how The American Revolution was indeed just that, in the Frommian sense of the term — motivated by idealism, informed by ideas, driven by a desire for right and fairness in the face of tyranny.
In his keystone “Common Sense” from the era, Thomas Paine wrote, “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth….Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time…By referring the matter from argument to arms, a new era for politics is struck; a new method of thinking hath arisen.”
Well that rings strongly of — Chapman. “It sounds like a whisper/Poor people gonna rise up/And get their share/Poor people gonna rise up/And take what's theirs/Cause finally the tables are starting to turn/Talkin' bout a revolution.”
Amazingly, Paine, though he never read TGH, even invokes one of our Biblical examples. “The children of Israel being oppressed by the Midianites — Gideon marched against them with a small army, and victory, through the divine interposition, decided in his favor,” he writes.
A clear through-line is being drawn, from the righteous revolutions of the Bible through the American Revolution to the revolution that Chapman is talkin’ bout.
A classic question that often arises when studying American conflict from centuries past is what makes the Revolutionary War and Civil War so different. Weren’t they, in the end, just about ordinary people who felt a central government was oppressing them? Mr. TGH remembers his own debate from those faraway high-school days, and how Mrs. Kaplowitz so excitedly moderated it.
No time now for a big disquisition on that class (sorry, Kappy). But it’s fair to say that for all the righteous ideals of the Revolutionary War — the desire not to be taxed without being represented, etc etc — the Civil War offered a rather different kind of mission. With its goal to hang on to slavery — to maintain power for its own exploitative sake — it was…probably not the righteous cause of a revolution. It was more like the kneejerk greed of a rebel, a Korachian power grab of the worst kind. Not for nothing, perhaps, were the Confederates called rebels.
Which brings us back to Tom Petty. Because it turns out his use of the song title “Rebels” was no accident. It had a point. An overtone.
Yes, Tom Petty’s 1980’s radio jam is a low-key allegory of the Civil War.
His distasteful narrator is, it seems, still angry about it. “I can still see the eyes/Of those blue-bellied devils/When I'm walking round tonight/Through the concrete and metal/I was born a rebel, down in Dixie,” Petty sings. His character remains mad about a loss of power he never deserved.
It turns out that as much as the through-line of revolutionaries can be traced across history, the through-line of rebels can also be traced across history, from Korach to the Confederacy to a Tom Petty song. It turns out you can choose which one you want — the idealism of a revolutionary or the grabbiness of a rebel. And a whole lot of texts throughout the ages are secretly showing us how.
Happy Fourth.
Thank you for reading.