Korach was right: balancing truth and tactics for Disabled liberation
by Raphael Morris
Korach was right.
This may strike the reader as an odd claim, or at the very least a resistant reading. Consider Korach’s complaint: “All the community are holy, all of them, and YHVH is in their midst! Why then do you raise yourselves above YHVH’s congregation?” (Numbers 16:3)
Understandably, we — with our democratic values and egalitarian affinities — are moved by such an argument. But more surprisingly, several classical commentaries — including Rashi — also insisted that Korach had a valid case!
Rashi, following the earlier Midrash Tanchuma, suggests that Korach’s complaint was both dynastic and political in nature. Korach and his followers (according to Midrash Tanchuma) objected to Moses assuming sovereignty (malkhut) over the Children of Israel, and giving Aaron and his descendants the priesthood. One or the other would, perhaps, have been acceptable. But supreme ritual and supreme political office, in the same family — this is unjust.
Indeed, although we tend to think of separation of powers as a modern phenomenon, it formed a crucial part of the political framework of Ancient Israel and Judah [1]. The priests (kohanim) were descendants of Aaron, a hereditary dynasty and a subset of the Tribe of Levi. Kings belonged to hereditary dynasties, often (though not always) descended from David, of the Tribe of Judah. And prophet was in no way a hereditary position — though there seem to have been prophetic guilds, it was not a family business [2].
But in the early days of the wandering in the wilderness, it was not at all clear that Moses would not pass the position of prophet and political leader down to his children. This is what Korach and his followers sought to avoid.
Korach wanted to make sure that Israel was not forever led by descendants of Moses and Aaron.
And he got what he wanted. Although the descendants of Aaron continued to hold the priesthood, the descendants of Moses vanish into obscurity [3], and the leadership of the Israelites passes to Joshua.
In fact, Korach’s own descendants have greater prestige than Moses’ descendants. They eventually receive a special status as psalmists and Temple singers; many of the psalms are described as “a psalm of the Sons of Korach”. Korach is also the ancestor of the prophet Samuel (1 Chronicles 6). Despite his death and the deaths of his followers, Korach’s argument is vindicated by Tanakh.
So if Korach was right, why was he punished? Why were he and all his followers swallowed by the earth?
Even though Korach was right, the way he went about agitating for change was ineffective. To quote a recent tumblr post from user sewer-swan: “please stop trying to convince me the cause is righteous and convince me the tactics are effective”.
As Disabled activists, we are frequently caught in the space between principles and tactics, between theory, praxis, and lived experience. Every time we publish, every time we talk to our doctors — hell, every time someone asks “How are you?” — we have to decide: Do we tell the truth, or do we say something tactical?
Because the truth is that, a lot of the time, being Disabled sucks.
Emotional dysregulation, anxiety, panic attacks, executive dysfunction, sensory processing issues (just to borrow from my own experience) — these are not bad just because I live in an inaccessible society. They are just bad. Like depression, chronic pain, and chronic fatigue, there isn’t a good side to these symptoms. They make my life worse, and they would still make my life worse even if I lived in a utopia without ableism or inaccessibility.
But I have to be careful where I say this, and to whom.
Because all too often, the admission that impairment is real, that some parts of our experience are intrinsically negative and reduce our quality of life in and of themselves, gets taken as a vindication of the medical model of Disability, the idea that Disability is entirely a ‘personal tragedy’ and never a structural, social problem.
In a day and age filled with fearmongering around Disability, where people keep talking about ‘curing’ Autism, where people who mask in public are met with suspicion and sometimes even violence, and where new frontiers in bioengineering have brought questions around eugenics into the spotlight, it’s a serious concern. As activist Liz Crow put it: [4]
Are we concerned that 'admitting' there could be a negative side to impairment will undermine the 'professional' (SuperCrip?) image in our campaigns? Or that showing every single problem cannot be solved will inhibit or excuse non-Disabled people from solving anything? Or that we may make the issues so complex that lay-people feel constructive change is outside their grasp? Or even that 'admitting' it can be awful to have impairments may fuel the quality of life/right to death/eugenics debate? Or perhaps we are simply afraid that if we 'admit' just once, to ourselves, how we really feel we may never quite manage to suppress it again?
The answer to Crow’s questions is “Yes!” This is exactly what we are worried about! We are concerned that if our struggles with executive dysfunction become public, then potential employers will discriminate against us, even for jobs we could excel in. We are concerned that admitting that carrying extra weight can lead to fatigue and body pain will just cause others to label our bodies ‘unhealthy’ instead of making life more accessible for us. We are concerned that any suggestion that our ability to make informed decisions might actually be compromised by psychosis or other mental illness will end with all patient autonomy being stripped away from us.
It is worth remembering that Crow was writing in 1992, in the UK. But the Disability Rights Movement has developed in very different directions in the past 30 years on either side of the Atlantic. The Social Model of Disability, which was already becoming standard in policy-making spaces in the 1990s in the UK, is still not mainstream in the US. And in recent years, the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement has actively undone some of the progress that has been made in the US, leading to a resurgence in body-shaming and the proliferation of conspiracy theories.
The last paragraph of Crow’s article began “Now that Disabled people’s politics are established within a credible social movement…” It is deeply disheartening to see things in 2026 arguably worse than they were in 1992, at least across the pond.
Right now, there is a genuine risk of Disabled people’s testimony about our lived experiences being misconstrued and weaponised against us.
Perhaps Korach was right, but he chose his moment poorly. Perhaps Israel was not yet ready for the movement he was leading. Perhaps he ought to have swallowed his pride, instead of being swallowed by the earth along with his entire faction.
Perhaps — and yet, I want to believe that Korach’s decision was more than a mere tactical blunder — as does the Midrash. “Now since Korach was a clever man, how did he see fit to commit this folly?” asks the Midrash Tanchuma.
The Midrash imagines that Korach saw a prophetic vision of his great descendants: the prophet Samuel, his grandson Heman the royal seer, the Temple singers and musicians. Foreseeing this prestigious lineage, he wrongly assumed he would survive the imminent trial by ordeal.
Or perhaps — and now I am offering a resistant reading — Korach was simply playing the long game. Perhaps it was a tactical error — but a strategic gambit.
In Numbers 26:10, the death of Korach and his followers, by earthquake and by fire, is described as “וַיִּהְי֖וּ לְנֵֽס”: “And they became a ness.”
What does the Hebrew word ness mean? We often think of it as a miracle (as in the Chanukah slogan ness gadol hayah sham — “a great miracle happened there”). Certainly, a dramatic punishment by Divine intervention through fire and fissure seems miraculous in the stereotypical sense. Contextually, in this verse, the word is often translated as “example” or “warning”.
But the core meaning of the word ness is a banner or a standard. One might assume — as most translators do — that this means a warning sign in this context. But the hermeneutical rules of Rabbi Ishmael that guide the classical art of rabbinic hermeneutics suggest that when the meaning of a word is unclear, it may be understood through reference to a nearby verse.
And the very next verse, Numbers 26:11 is: “The sons of Korach, however, did not die.”
I want to suggest that in dying, Korach and his band became a symbol, a rallying point for his descendants. Maybe Korach’s rebellion was tactically disastrous, achieving nothing in the short term. But Korach was always the Banquo to Moses’ Macbeth; though Moses flourishes and Korach dies, it is Korach whose descendants are destined for greatness.
Perhaps now is not the time to speak our truth. The fear is real, and it is rational. But if we never talk about our own experiences, we will never reach the time when we actually can change things. As Crow writes:
This fear encourages us to develop a 'conspiracy of silence'. Impairment is safer not mentioned at all; impairment has become a 'dirty word'. Our silence has introduced a whole range of taboos; a whole new series of constraints. Yet many of us are frustrated and disheartened by pain, fatigue, depression and chronic illness, including the way they prevent us from railing fully against Disability; we fear for our futures with non-static or additional impairments; we mourn past activities that are no longer possible for us; we are afraid we may die early or that suicide may seem our only option; we desperately seek some effective medical intervention; we feel ambivalent about the possibilities of our children having impairments; and we are motivated to work for the prevention of impairments. And if we can't talk to other Disabled people about these things, who can we talk to?
Maybe in our public-facing political messaging we need to simplify our frameworks, make prudent tactical choices. But in our organising, in our spaces of solidarity, in our testimony to one another, we need to make space for nuance.
If we distort our own experiences to make ourselves legible to hegemony, we are doing our oppressors' jobs for them. We are excluding from our movement the people who will always have to suffer their impairments, even in the world we are trying to build, and abandoning our Disabled comrades who cannot pretend that their disadvantages are purely social.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t space for discretion. Sometimes your messaging has to be different depending on your audience. Bad tactics can set back a movement. Sometimes, like the sons of Korach, we need to separate from a faction for our own self-preservation.
But that doesn’t mean we forget them. In the world we’re building, we will sing the songs they couldn’t.
[1] The Hasmoneans (Maccabees) very deliberately eroded this separation of powers, combining the office of political leader (ethnarch or king) and ritual leader (high priest), with disastrous consequences exemplified by the tyrannical Alexander Jannaeus.
[2] The situation of Eli and Samuel complicates matters somewhat, as they are described as both priests and judges, and — in Samuel’s case — a prophet (1 Samuel 1-3). However, none of this is straightforward. Samuel is adopted into the priesthood rather than born into it (and his status as a priest is controversial), Eli’s priestly dynasty is emphatically and prophetically announced as degenerate, both Eli and Samuel have sons who are explicitly stated to be unworthy dynastic successors, and ultimately (if reluctantly) guiding the transition of power to the new political framework of the monarchy. Interestingly, Samuel himself is described in 1 Chronicles 6 as a direct descendant of Korach!
[3] Some scholars suggest that the restriction to descendants of Aaron may have been a historically later change, and that in its earliest stages, the Israelite priesthood had a broader membership, which might have included descendants of Moses. If this is the case, one might read the Korach narrative as part of a redactional tradition retroactively legitimising the restricted Aaronite priesthood.
[4] Crow, L. ‘Renewing the Social Model of Disability’, Coalition, Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People, July 1992.
Raphael Morris (he/they) is an AuDHD rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He feels privileged to be part of an intellectual tradition where his preferred modes of cognition, learning, and communication are not just tolerated but actively valued. In his spare time, he enjoys wiki walking, Talmud, long rambling conversations and anything else tangential.
