In this meditation, we explore the feelings behind Korach’s rebellion, the sense of not-enoughness, of lack, of wanting, that in some way we all feel inside, the sense of a hole inside, which for Korach, manifested outside him as the earth swallowing him up. We spend our lives dealing with these holes as Korach did, by trying to fill them from the outside, looking for prestige, attention, honor, approval, love in different ways. In this meditation, we experment with letting go of these hole-filling projects and instead allowing ourselves to feel — wihtout being swallowed up by it — the emptiness inside, to really touch it and sense how, deep in its core, this hole, this wanting, is our soul’s cry to return to God and to return to our essence. We consider the movemnt of the sons of Korach in this direction, how they did teshuva and turned the hole into a mound, how they turned the yearning and the wanting into songs that we still sing in the Psalms.
Text Sources for this Meditation:
Story of Korach itself: Numbers 16-17
On sons of Korach:
Numbers 26:11 and Rashi on that verse
Megillah 14a, Sanhedrin 110a
Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira (later known as “Esh Kodesh”), Bney Machshavah Tovah, Section 11, end of first paragraph. (For a translation, See Andrea Cohen-Kiener, Conscious Community).
Psalms by “sons of Korach”: 42, 44-49, 84-85, 87-88
Photo by Anthony DeRosa at Pexels
