For Korah, being a Levite is not enough — he wants priesthood as well — but I want to take a moment to honor the role of the Levite.
To be a Levite is to keep others company. Leah gave her third son the name Levi in hopes of accompaniment by her less than fully loving husband, Yaakov — maybe now yilaveini ishi, “my husband will accompany me,” she says. The tribe of Levi takes its cues from this name, assigned to accompany (see, in this week’s parsha, Num 18:2-4) the priests as they go about their sacrificial work and to accompany the Tabernacle vessels — to carry them on the people’s desert sojourn and guard their sanctity — perhaps also to keep God company in the Tabernacle and, later, dispersed as a tribe in cities dotted throughout the country, to keep the entire people company as well.
What beautiful unsung heroism keeping company is! As Rhondda May pointed out to me, being an accompanist in a musical performance requires extraordinary talent, making an essential contribution to the whole. The work of keeping company is the work of angels, malakhei levaya, like the angels who accompany Yaakov out of the land of Israel and later, back in again, and like the angels that accompany us home from synagogue on Friday night whom we welcome with Shalom Aleikhem. They are angels of protection and care and simple company on our journey through life. We do the work of such angels — levaya — when we accompany our guests on their way out of our homes or when we accompany the deceased on their way to their burial place.
This divine service of accompaniment was the special provenance of the tribe of Levi. Perhaps we can all act the Levi for each other and also, just as importantly, for our own internal parts that so desperately need company. Levi was born out of loneliness, Leah’s sense of abandonment by her husband, her desperate longing to be connected. We all have those places inside us. One can imagine that the sacred Tabernacle vessels carried by the Levites through the desert also had some such longing; broken apart from one another for the journey, yearning to return to their connected whole in the Tabernacle.
How do we hold such pieces inside us? They are broken in so many ways — not just loneliness, but grief, despair, anxiety, the pain of unworthiness and not mattering, the sense of yes, not being enough or whole, all the pieces of us that tear at us in need of repair. What do we do with such parts?
Korah takes an aggressive approach. Surely he was suffering from some such insecurity, from this yearning sense of insufficiency in his reaching for more. He tries to manhandle the situation, to force transformation, to take in something from outside to make it better.
But no, that is not the Levite way. The Levitical stance offers a gentler approach — to simply keep these parts company, to say to them: “I am here. I will stay with you. I will not abandon you.” Not to restlessly reach out for more — like Korah — to cover up the hole, but to stay, to lean in, to trust that this, too, this pain, is also a precious vessel, that this hole is an opening, a channel through which divine energy may flow. To carry these parts on our shoulders or in our arms like small children, gently and tenderly, with love and care and a sense of their value and sanctity as sacred vessels of the sanctuary of God that each of us is. Not to reject or diminish or scramble to fix and add, but just to be present, to keep company — divine company, to draw down the divine presence — for the lonely Leah heart inside us.
And maybe, too, to sing — the Levites kept company by singing in the sanctuary — to sing a lullaby of eternal company and vastness, to sing a song of faith in our not aloneness, in our essential wholeness, to sing it out so all our parts and the parts of others can hear and take comfort and know they are not alone, never alone, that the voice of the beloved is always right here beside them, very near.
When we each do this work — each one carrying her precious broken vessels through our desert crossing — when we each carry our parts of the Tabernacle, then we begin to build something together; we begin to build a sanctuary on earth where God can indeed dwell. When we act the Levi — play the accompanist role to those inside and outside us who need it — we draw down divine accompaniment into this world, create a space for it right here. Let the world be filled with God’s presence through our Levi-inspired accompanying hearts.
