Lords, Dukes, Kings, Gods, & Korakh

I just finished watching the stupidest Netflix series about Spanish Royalty.

I couldn’t tear myself away from it, even knowing it was all fake.

Such a soap opera.

But the clothing!

And the romance—between royalty and kitchen staff.

A kind and gentle duke who renounces his royal status for love.

A child born a slave, but rescued by royalty to live as such—equal in the eyes of the king—or duke, or whatever.

Ugh.

The worst.

When I was growing up, I remember my father teaching us children how American culture is fascinated by royalty.

Or at least the wealthy.

That’s why, he said, American democracy is a fake.

Because our American culture is created by those who want to maintain the status quo:

A few at the top, the rest underneath.

Our TV shows depict even the poor living not too shabbily.

Big, beautiful apartments for beautiful people who work in coffee shops, for intance. (“Friends,” anyone?)

We watch and dream of having lives like theirs: cute, funny, beautiful.

Then we go out and buy things that make us feel like we might make it to that place some day.

Leaving even less money for rent.

Don’t lie. I know you’ve done it too.

And what about slavery as depicted on TV?

Remember “Roots”?

Though revolutionary for its time, it made us hold onto the hope that “not all slaveholders were mean.”

Yeah, I’m sure that’s true.

But only in the past couple of decades has awareness become more raised around the true evils of slavery.

And the mentality of slavery is that some humans are less human than others.

This is where Torah enters the picture.

Korakh organizes a rebellion out of anger that he and his family don’t get to be priests like Moses and his brother.

They are merely Levites, caretakers of the Temple (the dukes of the Temple?)

He protests that Moses has gone too far; we can all be priests, can’t we?

But it is Korakh who goes too far and is punished by God along with many others.

So they are swallowed up by the earth.

I heard Jonathan Sacks (Lord Rabbi, as it turns out—true story) comparing chimps to humans and the fight to the top.

In his talk, he discusses the Jewish mystical idea that we humans have both an animal soul and a Godly soul.

This is not so different, he points out, from what science understands today about humanity.

We are not disembodied minds.

We have physical needs as humans.

These needs often take over our ability to think and act in rational ways.

And while hierarchy is normal among humans, it did not begin to dominate the world until agriculture became a thing.

Then came land ownership and kingship.

Dominating others to work the land became the norm.

This is also when monoculture became a thing, along with malnutrition and starvation when the crops failed (listen to or read Yuval Noah Harari for more on this).

And we have been taught that this is just the way things are, and they can never change.

But the truth is much more complex.

Before agriculture, humans lived communally, and in a much more egalitarian way.

The focus was on the survival of the tribe.

Sacks says that Judaism comes into the world as a protest; made in God’s image, we are all equally fragments of the Divine.

Of course, Judaism also reflects the society in which it was born.

God is our King, our Father—very problematic for many of us.

Torah was written down and received in a time when royalty and slavery were already the norm.

But Sacks points out that our Sages asked and answered the question of why God was created in the singular form:

So no one could say, “My ancestors were greater than yours.”

The truth about Judaism is, of course, much more complex than this, as is the world.

But some sages somewhere definitely had the right idea.

I believe that we humans are capable of finding our way back to a time of greater egalitarianism.

Our survival as a species depends on it.

We certainly have the brains.

And the technology.

I love this quote from Yuval Noah Harari:

“History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”

But what I like better is the less cynical idea that each one of us is a fragment of the One.

And that the Messiah will come when we have learned to live as if we really believe that.

May it be so.