When my grandfather, Rabbi Benson Skoff, was in the third grade, he ran for class president. He told me that he ran against a girl in his class and that he thought the gentlemanly thing to do would be to vote for her. And he expected her to do the same.
She didn’t.
When they tallied the votes, she had won by one vote.
We all deal with adversaries a little differently. And we can’t always turn an enemy into a friend. But sometimes the most valuable thing we can do to fight back is to maintain our integrity. Being a mensch, even when everyone else is playing by different rules.
This is the issue that Moses faces in this week’s story of Korach. Korach is a bully. He wants to take Moses out. He turns hundreds of people against Moses. And when that happens, when you have an enemy like that, it’s so tempting to sink down to their level. To say, he’s playing dirty, so I have to play dirty.
But, unfortunately, that just gives the person who hates you the most the power to control your behavior. Instead, the only way to win is by staying true to what we know is right.
When even God loses patience and wants to kill the entire group of Korach’s rebels, Moses is the voice of integrity. In the midrash, the rabbis’ fan fiction on the story, Moses says: God, did you forget you are all-knowing? Why would you kill an entire group when you have the wisdom to know who is evil and who is not? So use your power for good; do the right thing.
Sometimes, even God needs to be reminded to be a mensch.
This past week, I had the opportunity to sit with Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit brought against Harvard that accused the university of failing to protect its students against antisemitism. The suit was subsequently settled.
Among many inspiring stories he shared with us during a dinner supporting Israel Bonds, what stuck with me was his charge to redefine what Jewish resistance looks like. It’s not about directly confronting the bully, it’s not about meeting every attack with a counterattack. This is the kind of reactivity that lets our ideological adversaries control the narrative, he said.
Continuing to come to shul when antisemites want us to be fearful is resistance. Praying for peace in the face of those who advocate for war is resistance. Speaking up against hateful misinformation is resistance, too. Living a joyful and principled Judaism — that is the resistance that has preserved our people through the hardest of moments.
Now more than ever, as individuals and as Jews, we can’t get dragged down by the people who want us to react and overreact, by the Korachs who threaten to bring out the worst in us.
When we sink down to their level, we give them a power over us that they don’t deserve. Our teachers, on the other hand — Shabbos Kestenbaum, Rabbi Benson Skoff and Moshe Rabbeinu — remind us of the Jewish way to fight back: by being a mensch.
Rabbi Jared Skoff serves Congregation B’nai Amoona and is a member of the St. Louis Rabbinical and Cantorial Association, which coordinates the d’var Torah for the Jewish Light.
