Parasha: Korach · Aliyah: Fifth (Hod)

דבר אל בני ישראל וקח מאתם, "speak to the children of Israel and take from them, etc." The expressions דבר plus קח suggest that we are speaking about two separate subjects. G'd said דבר, referring to the fact that 1) the Israelites were to bring one rod representing their respective tribes; 2) Moses was to accept these rods from them. Although the Torah did not spell out who was to bring these rods to Moses, the letter ו at the beginning of the words וקח alludes to this. [The problem is that the Torah did not spell out exactly what it was that Moses was to take from the children of Israel. Ed.] An additional reason for the Torah to write וקח with the extra letter ו may be that this demonstration was additional to the conversion of the 250 censers into covers for the altar which had also been described as being a memorial to what happened to Korach and associates. The people had to be given visual evidence that G'd had chosen Aaron.

מאתם…מאת כל נשיאהם, "from them…from all their princes." The reason the Torah said both מאתם and did not content itself with writing מאת נשיאהם, is to ensure that Moses would accept these rods only from the princes and that he should not set aside 12 rods on behalf of the respective tribes. Had the Torah only written that Moses was to take these rods from the princes this would not have obligated the princes to come forward and present Moses with these rods. Moses could have acted as their representative and assigned a rod for each tribe. Alternatively, we could have thought that if the Torah had only written the words מאת נשיאהם this meant that the rods should be the property of the various princes but that Moses should take them, i.e. select them; therefore the Torah added the word מאתם to teach that the princes themselves must bring these rods to Moses. At any rate, the reason the Torah was so specific was to prevent anyone from claiming afterwards that Moses had selected a rod for them that never had a chance to blossom and that therefore the fact that Aaron's rod blossomed did not prove anything.

ואת שם אהרון תכתב על מטה לוי, "and you will inscribe the name Aaron on the rod of the tribe of Levi." The Torah had to mention this as it had not previously written that the tribe of Levi was one of the 12 tribes for whom rods were to be taken. [Menashe and Ephrayim could have made up the tribe of Joseph. Ed.] It is possible that the whole procedure was that they took one long rod and divided it into 12 equal lengths and every tribal head came and took one length of the same original rod. In that way the test was absolutely fair as all the parts of that rod had come from the same root. If this was the procedure we can also understand the meaning of the words ומטה אהרון בתוך מטותם, "that the rod of Aaron was a part of their rods" (verse 21). I have found an opinion quoted in Bamidbar Rabbah 18,23 which confirms what I have just written.

והיה האיש אשר אבחר בו, "and it will be that the rod of the man whom I choose will bud." All the miracles G'd had performed with Korach had not sufficed to convince the people. Perhaps this was because the people thought that Korach's sin was that he challenged Moses so that G'd had had to defend the honour of His prophet, but that this did not prove that G'd was not willing to choose another tribe from which the High Priest would be chosen.

ויגמל שקדים, it bore ripe almonds. Our sages in Bamidbar Rabbah 18,23 say that the reason G'd chose almonds was to serve as a warning that anyone who would challenge that the priesthood belonged to the descendants of Aaron would be dealt with very promptly. It appears to me that what forced the sages to come to this conclusion was that if someone is desirous of having a miracle performed for him he does not wish the fruit to ripen prematurely as this could reflect something negative about the one who performs the miracle and is unable to deliver fully ripened fruit. If G'd nonetheless exposed Himself to such an interpretation by the people who watched this miracle it could only be because He had considerations which outweighed those of how His own image was being perceived.