Maidenhead Synagogue – 13 June 2026 / 28 Sivan 5786
Parashat Korach
How Do We Get Out of a Difficult Situation?
Occasionally, we are stuck in a cycle of resentment. Parashat Korach, which we read last Shabbat, offers some fascinating insights to find a way out.
Our reading this morning begins after the worst is over. The rebellion of Korach is behind us. The fire has come down, the ground has closed, and we might expect the camp to settle. But it does not settle. The very next morning the people turn on Moses and Aaron and blame them for the deaths, and a plague breaks out, and thousands more are lost before Aaron runs into the middle of the dying with his firepan and holds back the wave with incense. Only then does the murmuring stop. This is the part of the story we do not put in a children’s book! It is the aftermath, the long and unglamorous work of a community trying to find its feet again after it has nearly destroyed itself.
And the way our portion brings that work to an end is strange and quiet. God tells Moses to collect twelve staffs, one for the head of each tribe, with Aaron’s name on the staff of Levi, and to lay them overnight in the Tent of Meeting. In the morning Moses goes in, and one of the staves has changed.
Aaron’s staff had sprouted: it had brought forth sprouts, produced blossoms, and borne almonds. (Numbers 17:23)
A dead piece of wood, cut long ago from a living tree, carried through the desert as a walking-stick and a symbol of an official charge, had come alive overnight. Not only budded, but it also ran the whole course in a single night: shoot, blossom, and ripe fruit. The rabbis noticed that the almond, the shaked, is the first tree to wake in the year, the early riser, and they heard in its name the speed of it. The dead thing that nobody expected anything from had become, overnight, the most alive thing in the camp.
I want to hold that image beside another one, that of the firepan, because the two of them sit at either end of this same story, and together they say something I think we need to hear.
Just before the staffs, the Torah deals with the firepans of the men who died in the rebellion. These were the instruments of the revolt, the censers the rebels carried when they challenged Aaron. And God does not have them buried or melted down out of sight. They are to be hammered thin and fixed to the altar because, the Torah says, having been brought before God they have become holy, and they are to be a reminder to Israel for ever. So, the wreckage of the worst day is beaten flat and worked into the surface of the holiest object in the camp, where no one can worship without touching the metal of the day the community nearly tore itself apart.
Two objects, then, both made out of the same crisis. One is dead metal, kept. The other is dead wood, brought back to life. And I think a community living through a hard season needs both of them, because they answer two different questions.
The censers answer the question of memory. What do we do with the hard thing that happened? We do not bury it and pretend it never was, and we do not mount it on the wall and keep the grievance burning. We beat it thin. We take the weight out of it, and we work it into the structure so that it becomes part of how we stand together rather than a wound we keep reopening. The memory stays in plain sight but transformed. It has become part of the holy place rather than a threat to it.
The staff answers a different question, the harder one, the one that keeps people awake. After everything, can there be new life? Is the community simply a survivor of its crisis, carrying the scar, or can something actually grow again? And the answer the Torah gives is the almond branch. The thing that looked finished, the dead stick laid down in the dark, is exactly the thing that blossoms. Not a new staff brought in from outside. The old one. The same wood that went through the whole bitter story is the wood that flowers.
And the order of events matters. First the metal, then the wood. First, the honest keeping of what happened; the refusal to pretend otherwise; and only then the new life. The staff does not blossom because everyone agreed to forget the rebellion. It blossoms in a community that has just fixed the evidence of its worst day to the altar and chosen to keep looking at it. New life does not come from amnesia. It comes after the truth has been told and given its place.
Every community that has come through something difficult stands in front of these two objects, whether it names them or not. There is metal lying in the ashes of any hard season, and the temptation is always to get rid of it quickly, to move on, to say it is behind us now. The Torah asks for something slower and braver: keep it, but transform it, beat it into something the community can carry. And then, only then, watch for the wood. Because the promise of this morning’s reading is that the blossom comes from the old staff, not a new one. The life that grows after a hard time grows out of the very thing that went through it.
Aaron’s staff was kept, the tradition tells us, laid up beside the tablets and the manna as a sign for later generations. The almonds and the blossoms stayed on it. Long after the rebellion was over, the branch that had been dead and came alive was preserved, not as a trophy or as a warning, but as a promise: that wood like this can flower, that a community can be more alive on the far side of its hardest days than it was before. May we be that kind of community, honest about the metal and patient for the wood, and may we live to see the almonds on the branch.
Shabbat shalom.