Rabbi Breit's Blog

Korach’s rebellion begins with an argument. He challenges Moses and Aaron’s authority, saying, “You have gone too far, sons of Levi!” He takes issue with their leadership, or maybe with his own secondary leadership position, or maybe with their teachings, or even, as some of the rabbis say, with God and Torah. He is combative — bringing 250 high ranking men with him to this confrontation, non-collaborative with a strong focus on riling up an ‘us’ versus the Moses/Aaron ‘them’, and greedy. Was it not enough for him to be a Levite himself and, according the the rabbis, the absolutely wealthiest one at that? But consider for a moment that perhaps the most perverse element of his group’s rabble rousing argument was its use of nostalgia.

We have each of us probably been caught in a bad faith argument before. Maybe it was with a family member, a colleague, or a rival and probably it was frustrating and demoralizing. And hopefully many of us have also had a good faith argument — one that results in more wisdom, deeper understanding of those involved, and a sense of two minds sharpening one another, as the rabbis teach good scholars in debate will do. What’s the difference? A bad faith argument rests on falsehoods and uses them to its advantage.

Nostalgia can be a tool of a bad faith argument. The falsehoods are an imagined uptopia of the past. Datan and Aviram, two Korach cronies, rebuke Moses and Aaron by saying, “Is it not enough that you brought us from a land flowing with milk and honey to have us die in the wilderness, that you would also lord it over us?” Now keep in mind the land they’re saying flows with milk and honey isn’t Israel, it’s Egypt. Egypt, where they were in abject slavery and under abuse and heavy labor. They are certainly affronting God by transferring God’s epithet for the promised holy land to the land they were freed from. And they are also using the power of nostalgia to detach their listeners from reality and imagine for them dream alternate course life from which they feel they were robbed.

They’re dreaming up a beautiful past, ease and plenty in Egypt, that now they can encourage the people to mourn and pine for and to resent Moses, who freed them out of it. They are imagining a remembrance of an idyllic past, savoring any positive parts and cruelly glossing over the past’s harsh reality. Nostalgia says, "Life was beautiful then. Everything was better then. This freedom, this modernity, this journey is taking us away from goodness". Know as “rosy retrospection”, people often remember the best parts of the past, the onions and leeks and fish of Egypt, and our memories notoriously drop the bad parts. It's normal. It can be soothing. But when we rely on this false past to build our future, or edit our present, we are working off a shaky foundation of distorted half truths and outright lies.

We see nostalgia frequently and from all sides in politics and from generation to generation. And we use it in personal arguments too. "Things were better before you moved here. I was young and free before they came along. If only we could go backwards!" Nostalgia says we should, or at least we prods us to resent the present and the people who led us there. But let parshat Korach be your teacher. If you find yourself, in your private or public life, arguing for the paradise of the past or that paradise that exists somewhere else, you can ask yourself, am I being Korach? Is this a good faith argument? Shabbat shalom.