The hole that swallowed up Korah and his band is a hole we are familiar with. For us it is not a hole in the earth, but a hole inside us, the gaping hole of wanting, the relentless sense of lack, the core emptiness, that surely also lay behind Korah’s actions, that made him and his cronies feel so desperately needy and dissatisfied.
We cannot escape this hole. Sometimes stronger and sometimes weaker, it feels at times like a sense of inadequacy or worthlessness, and at other times like a feeling of something essential missing in our lives, a neediness, a wanting and a yearning for something more.
We tend to approach the hole the way that Korah did – by trying to fill it. We spend much of our lives seeking out ways to fill this hole, to fill that empty place inside with prestige, honor, value, love, attention, approval, money, even food, from outside. That’s what Korah did. He tried to fill the hole of insufficiency by getting more honor and prestige, by seeking out the priesthood.
The problem is that this kind of hole can never be completely filled from outside. It is a hungry ghost. No matter how much you put it, it still feels empty. Instead of being able to fill it, it swallows us whole sometimes, as it swallowed up Korah, swallows us up in the intensity of its desires so that it feels like there is nothing else but wanting.
But there is another way. Not to try to fill the hole and also not to get swallowed up by it. This other way involves letting go of the hole-filling projects, at least for a moment, and allowing yourself to actually feel the emptiness. Taking a step back from the hole so you have a little distance and don’t fall in and get swallowed whole by it, but staying close enough that you can still touch it, get to know it, feel its pain and find out what is at its core.
Because here’s the thing. There is sacredness to this wanting. It is actually, at its very core, down very very deep, our soul’s cry for God, yearning to return to its Source, yearning to reconnect to our own divine essence. We cover over that cry with our busyness and our attempts to fill it in the world, but at its core, it is a sacred cry. Tzamah likha nafshi. My soul thirst for You, God. That is what this hole is – an unquenchable thirst, a yearning to return, to be with God, to return to ourselves.
The Esh Kodesh (in an early work called Bnei Machshavah Tovah, #11), says that when we cover over the cries of our soul with our attempts to fill up the hole in some superficial way, it is like what used to happen with Molech. Molech is the idolatrous practice of child sacrifice, and during the ceremony, the priests used to beat the drums loudly so that the parents would not hear the cries of the child being burned alive. That’s what we are doing when we busily try to fill our holes with our addictions and seeking and distractions – we are drowning out our soul’s cries.
But we can do it differently. We can stop all the noise that surrounds the hole and just listen to the cries, to the yearning, really attend to it, allow ourselves to feel the pain. We are bnei Korah, the children, the descendants of Korah. We have been handed down this wanting, this sense of lack, and handed down also, from our families and society, the sense that the answer is to drown out the cries with noise or to fill the hole up with doing. But bnei Korah in the Torah didn’t follow in their father’s footsteps. The Torah says (later in Numbers, 26:11): ubnei Korah lo metu. “The children of Korah did not die.“ The midrash explains: They didn’t die because they did teshuva, repentance (Megillah 14a, Sanhedrin 110a).
We can do teshuva. It’s not easy. It’s ingrained in us to keep covering up the cries, to avoid hearing them or to get busy trying to fill them with things that never satisfy. We are habituated to doing that. But we can do teshuva. We can return – to God and to ourselves.
And we can do that return, that teshuva, through the means of this hole, these soul cries, this intense yearning. It is this very pain, this very hole, that will, if we dig deeply enough, if we stay with it long enough, turn into a channel of return, a channel of divine connection, a tunnel that leads us back to our Source. We run away from the hole, we turn away, we try desperately to fill it, but actually to be with it in presence is to allow ourselves to return, to allow the hole to open up into a channel that takes us back home.
There is a transformation that is possible here. The midrash says that what happened to the children of Korah is that, in doing teshuva from the place of the pit, a little mound formed for them from within Gehenom – nitbatzer lahem makom gavoha– “a high place was fortified for them.” As if the hole turned upside down to form a mountain, out of this very low place, out of the pit, the depths of the hole, out of the wanting itself, there emerged – fortified and strong – a high place, a holy place – for them to sit on. Our low places can become our high places, our places of strength and power and connection.
And what did the children of Korah do in that place, sitting on that mound? Yashvu ve’amru shirah. They sat and they sang. Shirah. Song. The cries of our soul want to transform into songs of praise and joy. Our soul wants not to cry, but to sing, to turn yearning into a song of connection, to send out the wanting, the yearning, on song notes like waves of love, to send them out to reach another plane, to reach our deepest selves and the God who waits for us there.
Bnei Korah became singers and writers of songs. We have many psalms with their names at the front; they knew how to sing, how to take their yearning – mima’amakim keratikha Hashem, “out of the depths I call you, God” – to take the yearning from deep inside and turn it into songs of connection to God above, to take what they received from Korah, their father, to take what we receive from our history and culture, the sense of relentless wanting and seeking, and to go so deep into that energy that it takes us home. The yearning brings us home.
