Thank you, once again, to Rabbi Gerber for offering me this opportunity to share some words of Torah in his stead this week:
When I was in college, a friend of mine embarked on a research project about post-Cold War monuments in Europe. He visited monuments in Eastern and Western Europe and talked to the people who lived there about what these monuments meant. He also explored the ethics of monument-building - who and what do we choose to memorialize? How do we memorialize events that are contested, or that require education and context? Can one build a monument that is ambivalent? Learning from this friend was the first time I ever really thought critically about monuments and memorials.
How might this connect to this week’s Torah portion, Korach? In our parashah, a group of Israelites challenge Moses’ and Aaron’s authority. As part of this challenge, they make an incense offering that is violently rejected by God; all of the rebels are swallowed up by the earth, leaving only the fire-pans on which they made the offering. After this traumatic episode, God instructs Moses to collect these fire-pans and to beat them into a covering for the sacred altar (Numbers 17:3-5). In a way, God instructs Moses to create a lasting monument to Korach’s rebellion and its aftermath.Later readers of this text were fascinated by the
possible meaning of this altar covering. The 10th century French commentator Rashi wrote that it was a simple case of needing to find a sacred use for the fire pans; since they had been consecrated for an offering, they could not be disposed of. Another French commentator from the 13th century, known as the Chizkuni, wrote that the covering was intended to inspire people to ask questions, and in that way learn about the evils of Korach’s rebellion. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, had a radically different take. He wrote that the fire-pans of Korach’s band were used to cover the sacred altar to remind us that even rebellion can be holy, when it is a rebellion against stagnation and complacency.
In 2019, we in the U.S.A. find ourselves thinking and talking about monuments a great deal. There are new monuments being erected as we come to terms with our own past, such as the incredibly powerful lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. At the same time, we are embroiled in sometimes violent clashes over the removal of Confederate monuments. In San Francisco, a decision was recently made to remove a school building mural that depicts the Founding Fathers presiding over violence against Indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans.Ultimately, the decision to erect, restore, vandalize, remove, contextualize, or cover monuments is the representation of a public struggle over the meaning of our past and the direction of our future. Like the Israelites who
beat Korach’s fire pans into a covering for the altar, we humans are always trying to make meaning of our stories - perhaps especially the parts of our stories that leave us collectively wounded and in need of a way to hold our pain, and our hopes, sacred. As our values and our sense of the meaning of the past change, we find that our relationship with the symbols of the past evolves as well. When we enact this struggle in a public arena, with debates and decisions about physical monuments, we affirm that meaning is more than individual preference or feeling. We build and negotiate meaning collectively, and discover who we are (and who we want to be) in the process.CC images in this blog post, courtesy of:
1. AgnosticPreachersKid on Wikimedia Commons
2. torange.biz
3. Ariely on Wikimedia Commons
4. Soniakapadia on Wikimedia Commons
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