The Early Waker

Tomorrow morning my husband and I will walk into our own shul for the first time in weeks. We have been gone since mid May. Israel first — tramping about the Old City, visiting the Kotel, exploring the shuks. Then Poland, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands. Jewish ghetto streets turned gelato districts. Memorial plaques where there used to be neighborhoods. Chabad offering Shabbat dinners in cities where Jewish life depends almost entirely (or so it seems) on them and whichever tourists show up.

In the midst of all of it, the sirens ramped up in Israel and the Iranian war began while we were in Vienna.

We watched it unfold from European Airbnbs, hotels, and in Telegram channels and in WhatsApp groups with friends. Refreshing news apps. Messaging friends in Tel Aviv, Binyamin, Be'er Sheva, Ashdod, Haifa. It just became the 12-day war. A babushka war.

We flew home Tuesday. We are bone-tired in a way that sleep hasn't fixed yet.

For us though? Some sense of normalcy. For our friends? Not so much. And tomorrow? Our rabbi. Our seats. The people who know our names.

The parsha this Shabbat is Korach, and it is the Torah's portrait of a community cracking apart.

Korach is Moses's cousin — a Levite, a man of standing, not some fringe agitator. He gathers 250 respected leaders and marches on Moses and Aaron with a line that sounds, on first read, almost reasonable:

וַיִּֽקָּהֲל֞וּ עַל־מֹשֶׁ֣ה וְעַֽל־אַהֲרֹ֗ן וַיֹּאמְר֣וּ אֲלֵהֶם֮ רַב־לָכֶם֒ כִּ֤י כׇל־הָֽעֵדָה֙ כֻּלָּ֣ם קְדֹשִׁ֔ים וּבְתוֹכָ֖ם יְהֹוָ֑ה וּמַדּ֥וּעַ תִּֽתְנַשְּׂא֖וּ עַל־קְהַ֥ל יְהֹוָֽה׃

They combined against Moses and Aaron and said to them, “You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and GOD is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above GOD’s congregation?”

— Bamidbar 16:3

All the community are holy. Everybody heard God at Sinai. Who made you the boss?

It is the kind of argument that works precisely because there is a kernel of truth buried inside it.

Rashi points out that they all stood at Sinai. They all heard the commandments from God directly. Korach though seems to be weaponizing it.

The Mishnah draws the line sharply. A disagreement for the sake of heaven — like the debates of Hillel and Shammai — endures. A disagreement not for the sake of heaven — like Korach and his followers — does not.

The rabbis don't say Korach was wrong about everyone being holy. They say his purpose was wrong. He took a true statement and bent it into a tool for grabbing power. The words were right. The direction? Crooked.

What follows in the parsha is catastrophic. The earth opens. Fire descends. Those 250 faced some.... lets just say bad news. Fourteen thousand seven hundred people die in a plague. Korach's rebellion is the Torah's worst community fracture — worse than the golden calf, worse than the spies. The rupture is total.

And then God does something unexpected. After all of it — the swallowing, the fire, the plague — God tells Moses to collect a staff from the leader of each tribe. Twelve staffs, placed overnight in the Tent of Meeting. In the morning, one of them will have sprouted. That is how the people will know whom God has chosen.

Moses walks in the next day:

וַיְהִ֣י מִֽמׇּחֳרָ֗ת וַיָּבֹ֤א מֹשֶׁה֙ אֶל־אֹ֣הֶל הָעֵד֔וּת וְהִנֵּ֛ה פָּרַ֥ח מַטֵּֽה־אַהֲרֹ֖ן לְבֵ֣ית לֵוִ֑י וַיֹּ֤צֵֽא פֶ֙רַח֙ וַיָּ֣צֵֽץ צִ֔יץ וַיִּגְמֹ֖ל שְׁקֵדִֽים׃

The next day Moses entered the Tent of the Pact, and there the staff of Aaron of the house of Levi had sprouted: it had brought forth sprouts, produced blossoms, and borne almonds.

— Bamidbar 17:23

A dead stick. Left overnight. And in the morning: sprouts, blossoms, and ripe almonds — all at once, all on the same branch. Things that in nature never appear simultaneously. The entire life cycle of a tree compressed into a single night.

The Hebrew word for almond is shaked. It comes from the same root as "to watch," "to wake early." The almond is the first tree to blossom in the land of Israel — it wakes before everything else.

Jeremiah uses the same root when God tells him: I am watching over My word to perform it. The almond is the tree that shows up first.

After the worst fracture in the wilderness, God's answer is not another punishment. It is proof of life in dead wood. A staff that no one expected to do anything — a walking stick, a piece of cut timber — produces fruit overnight.

This past few days (even though it's felt like months), as the Iranian ceasefire settled and news trickled in from Israel, one detail stayed with me. During the twelve days of fighting, while Iranian missiles were landing in Israeli cities and Soroka hospital in Be'er Sheva took a direct hit that destroyed its surgical ward, the hospital's kept working.

Staff moved operations underground, into shelters and reinforced rooms. In those twelve days, Soroka delivered over a hundred babies. A hospital with a hole blown through its surgical building, under missile fire, and the maternity ward did not stop.

I keep thinking about those mothers and those medical teams. Nobody waited for the war to end. Nobody waited for conditions to improve. They showed up — underground, between sirens — and life came anyway.

On Wednesday I was on the phone with Cheryl Dorchinsky — executive director of the Atlanta Israel Coalition, under whose auspices this column's parent project runs — when the notification came through that El Al had reopened ticketing.

I told her my husband and I wanted to get back to Israel to volunteer. She wanted in. Before we hung up the phone we had booked our tickets. Delta from Atlanta to Miami, El Al from Miami to Tel Aviv. Leaving July 13. Landing the 14th. Eleven days on the ground.

I need more time here to recover. I want to spend more time with my own close community. But the need is great and the greater community simply cannot wait.

AIC is collecting funds and supplies to bring things that are desperately needed — items for children in hospitals, first aid kits for IDF soldiers, care packages for reservists, essentials for families who have lost their homes.

We are in contact with grassroots organizations across Israel, and the list grows every day. If you want to be part of what we are bringing, the Hearts United fundraiser is live — every dollar goes directly to the mission. Eleven days, boots on the ground, hands on.

But first: tomorrow. Our shul. The familiar faces, the rabbi's voice. Six weeks of wandering and now we are back in the place where people know which seat is ours.

After Korach — after the fracture, after the earth opened and the fire consumed — what healed the community was not a speech or a punishment or a policy change. It was a branch that bloomed in the dark, quietly, while everyone else was sleeping.

Some mornings, you walk in and something has sprouted.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham