Between Pharaohs and Nomads | 143For Buber, the Baalism of Korach is more significant than the Baalism of the
golden calf, which holds a much greater place in the folk memory. Buber com-
pletely rejects the view that the uprising was merely against the restriction of cul-
tic priestly functions to Moses or to a certain class of Levites, not only because he
doubts that Moses was ever a priest but also because he thinks that Korach shows
that “the eternal word is opposed by eternal contradiction.” Tragedy, another ele-
ment not often associated with Buber’s worldview, enters the picture here. Moses
places a wager on the people of Israel: that their urge to freedom from any human
master will lead them to recognize their true master in the Lord of the world.
And “until the present day,” for Buber, “Israel has really existed in the precise
degree in which Moses has proved right.”^63 Moses’ wager, however, depends on
the very same personality traits in Israel that give rise to the rebellion of Korach,
who is able to use Moses’ own words against him. Moses can never secure his
goal completely as long as he refuses to impose his will by force, yet imposing his
will would negate his project. And while he stands back in humility, others step
in to fill the void.
The Uncategorizable Man
This idea of the tragedy of Moses reaches to the heart of Buber’s conception of
theopolitics, and even further, to his conception of revelation and thus of Juda-
ism itself. Moses’ tragedy does not reflect the failure of any particular institution
or office, because theopolitics does not allow him to be defined by any one role: he
is not priest, prophet, judge, ruler, or even legislator. If Moses’ failure and tragedy
were traceable to his institutional role, some kind of reform of either institution
or role would suffice to eliminate the problems. A remediable problem, however,
is not a tragedy.^64 It is Moses’ uncategorizability that allows him to stand in for
Israel itself, and thus his tragedy represents Israel’s tragedy.^65
That Moses is not a priest is the easiest of these claims to grasp. The text
never sees a special priestly role for Moses, even when it outlines the duties of
the priestly class; in any case, Buber is in good historical-critical company when
he holds that the earliest textual strata report nothing about such a class. Far
more likely is the possibility that a centralized cult developed during the period
of the settlement of the land. Moses does perform occasional sacrifices, usually
without assistance; he does this “not as a professional priest but as the leader of
the people, as we afterwards also find, for example, in the case of Samuel.”^66 The
same is true for Moses’ transmitting God’s will in a unique way, independent
of any priestly tradition of divination. The Urim and Thummim are dated by
most scholars to a post-Mosaic period. “The priest is the greatest human spe-
cialization that we know,” Buber writes. “In his mission and his work Moses is
unspecialized; he is conditioned not by an office but by a situation, a historical
situation.”^67