#738: Unjustified Anger
Sforno on Bamidbar/Numbers 16:15
וַיִּ֤חַר לְמֹשֶׁה֙ מְאֹ֔ד וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ אֶל־יְהֹוָ֔ה אַל־תֵּ֖פֶן אֶל־מִנְחָתָ֑ם לֹ֠א חֲמ֨וֹר אֶחָ֤ד מֵהֶם֙ נָשָׂ֔אתִי וְלֹ֥א הֲרֵעֹ֖תִי אֶת־אַחַ֥ד מֵהֶֽם׃
Moses was much aggrieved and he said to יהוה, “Pay no regard to their oblation. I have not taken the ass of any one of them, nor have I wronged any one of them.”
Gimme Some Torah #738
The Torah tells us Korah’s rebellion left Moses feeling hurt and confused. He said to God, “I have not taken the ass of any one of them, nor have I wronged any one of them.” Sforno’s commentaries on Num. 16:15 shed some light on Moses’s emotional state:
לא חמור אחד מהם נשאתי, I have not even made use of things which any ordinary person would borrow from his neighbor without giving it a thought. This proves that my position of authority was exclusively used for their benefit and not for mine. Their present complaints prove only that they are extremely ungrateful, seeing that they have benefited from my leadership.
ולא הרעותי את אחד מהם, they cannot even accuse me of having wrongly convicted anyone of them in legal proceedings as they never brought any of their quarrels before me to have me adjudicate them.
These commentaries, which are similar to the thoughts of other parshanim, describe Moses as someone who was trying to make sense of the rebels’ rage. He thought about it logically and came to the conclusion that he was in the right. He thought about the conflict in legal terms, as would an attorney or a judge.
And this, in my opinion, is where Moses went wrong. In trying to comprehend the rebels’ anger as a function of logic and law, he missed out on an important lesson. The lesson is that anger often does not make sense, and attempting to understand it logically leads nowhere.
When someone is unjustifiably angry at us, we should not tie ourselves into knots in the vain hope of understanding the situation. We may, in fact, have nothing to do with the anger at all. It’s possible that we are merely a stand-in, a convenient target for the angry person’s unrelated emotional trauma.
And so it is with antisemitism, which is a stepchild of unjustified anger. The real reason behind antisemitism is that there is no reason, at least not one that makes any sense. Anti-Jewish hatred is illogical, and struggling to understand it is a fool’s errand.
A great deal of the rage we face has no relation to anything we have supposedly done or failed to do. We are simply the artificial scapegoat for those who are insecure about their faith, jobs, power, education, money, and a dozen other things.
Dangerous? Yes. Pathetic? You betcha. Logical? Nope.
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I am the rabbi of Temple Beth El in Somerset, New Jersey, and the author of The JPS Jewish Heritage Torah Commentary.