A Thought on Parshas Korach

"...tistarer..." (16:13) "...you're trying to rule over us..." Korach and his band of supporters were abrupt and direct in their confrontation of Moshe. They insinuated that he was guilty of nepotism and they accused him of seizing absolute power. Our verse is somewhat atypical of their focused, terse allegations in that it uses a doubled expression (tistarer;histarer) when a single word would have sufficed to make that point. What is the hidden message of this word emphasis, given that the Torah never includes a redundant or superfluous term? The Panae'ach Raza moves into a more kabbalistic mode of interpretation here, drawing on the approaches of remez and drush. He first offers the observation that when we view Hebrew words from the standpoint of their numerical equivalents (the gematria system wherein each letter doubles as a number, with alef equalling one, bais two and so on), we will note that the gematria of tistarer (tof shin tof raish raish) is 1500. What makes that unique, he writes, is that this is the highest numeric value of any single word in the Torah! The word may consist of a mere five letters but each tof equals 400, the shin 300 and each raish 200, totaling one thousand five hundred. Quite a large hidden significance for such a small cluster of letters. Now that the Panae'ach Raza has introduced this noteworthy facet of this small word, he branches into the significance of the word having that particular numeric value. What is 1500? He points out that were we to take the entire alef bais and add up the numeric values of all its letters, we would get a total of 1495. Now, other than this happening to be three years after Columbus left Spain during the Inquisition (which had not happened during the life of the Panae'ach Raza so it probably is a spurious correlation), what does 1495 suggest? You will note that it is only 5 points lower than 1500. The Panae'ach Raza then notes that in Hebrew, there are five other letters which we must contend with, namely that there are "final" letters for mem, nun, tzadi, pae and chof. Adding those five letter-variants to the overall gematria of the basic alef bais, we come up with a total of 1500. This was the contention of Korah and his crew. They were saying, in cryptic fashion, "Moshe - you hold no advantage over the rest of the nation. You heard the Torah being given, which is written with the letters of the alef bais, yet so did we. We all received the Torah from HaShem and we all have equal rights as to how it is practiced, too". This angle of critiquing Moshe, as if he was not in a position to claim superiority over the nation in that HaShem had given the Torah to everyone, was presented by wily Korach through this show of his deeper grasp of deciphering the Torah's secrets. He attempted to prove that a small group can have greater significance than meets the eye, just as the word tistarer contains more value than words of greater size and prominence, so that his small band of conspirators could claim greater quality despite their lesser quantity, and supersede the rule of Moshe. Wishing you a good Shabbos. D Fox