Korach
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch on Parashat Korach, read on Shabbat Korach — with one of this week's three questions for the two of you.
This week's parsha is the story of Korach — the rebellion that fractured the unity of the people in the wilderness. It is the Torah's clearest case study of what happens when something at the foundation breaks. Hirsch's claim, in Letter 16, is that the foundation of all Jewish communal life is not the synagogue and not the academy — it is the home. Long before there was a Mishkan in the desert, there was the tent of Avraham and Sarah, open on all four sides. The Jewish home is the first sanctuary, the original site of the Divine Presence. Everything else — the Beit HaMikdash, the synagogue, the wider community — was built on its model. Tend the home, Hirsch is saying, and you tend the place where everything begins.
If our home is meant to be a sanctuary — not metaphorically, but actually — what is one thing we'd want to feel different about how we walk into it after a hard day?
The full week — the passage itself with its source, the other two questions, and the closing verse of hope — lives in the app. Together Tomorrow on the App Store.