“If G-d will create a [new] creation and the ground will open its mouth and swallow them along with all of their belongings, and they will go down alive to the grave, then you will know that these men have angered G-d.” (Bamidbar 16:29-30)

Hashem created a punishment for Korach’s sin that was unlike any other punishment He ever meted out. There obviously must be some reason that this was necessary, aside from it being a sensational event that people would never forget.

The Yalkut tells us that Korach did not accept the Oral Law. The Hafla’ah (1731-1805) explains that we find similar punishments in other places in the Torah, and they all have to do with the same sin of denying the Oral Law. The Hafla’ah goes on to mention that one who is negligent in the eulogy of a Torah scholar should be buried alive, just as Korach was! Similarly, at the time of receiving the Torah, Klal Yisral had Mount Sinai suspended above their heads and Hashem said to them, “If you don’t accept the Torah, you will be buried here!” (See Tanchuma Parshas Noach that this was in order that Bnei Yisrael accept the Oral Law). The common denominator is being buried alive due to not accepting the Oral Law.

The Hafla’ah, however, does not explain why the specific punishment of burying alive is appropriate in these cases. The Maharal in Tiferes Yisrael explains that without acceptance of Torah, including The Oral Law, the World could not exist. Therefore, a person who denies the Oral Torah has no place to be buried in the world that exists only because of the Torah, of which The Oral Law is an intrinsic part.

I would like to offer a different explanation. All of the vegetation that we have comes from the ground and rises above, creating life. The Earth itself to the untrained eye looks like a stagnant, dormant inanimate object – though in truth soil is teeming with life. So too, the Oral Law comes forth from the written Torah. In order to accept the written Torah properly, we must trust our teachers, for only based on that which they teach us can we be certain that what we are learning is truly Torah. Meaning, we need to believe that there is an entire Torah (Oral Torah) underneath the surface (Written Torah).

I would like to share with you an event that happened to me many years ago. A man I knew who learned in the yeshivas of Europe before World War II, joined the “Conservative Movement” immediately after the War. When he was in his 50’s he became a member of the shul I davened in, and soon returned to be a full Torah-observant Jew. His son at that time was in public high school and struggled with his father’s change of allegiance. Eventually the son came to Israel to learn in a Conservative “yeshiva”. His father came to visit his beloved son and asked me to visit him in his hotel. While I was there, his son came in and the father beamed at me and said, “My son is a yeshiva bochur, too!” My blood began to boil. I wondered to myself, “In a school of apikorsim are there bnei Torah?” I proceeded to ask this student, “What do you learn in your school?” He replied, “We also learn Torah. We just have a better way of analyzing the Torah.” To this I responded, “When the Torah was given at Sinai, do you suppose the Oral law was given, too?” (I would never ask that question today). He responded, “Yes, I do.” I forged forward and asked him, “If the Torah was given with a method of study, and today one uses a different method to learn the Torah, isn’t it as if a math teacher gave his students a mathematical exercise, ‘What is 2 times 3’ and a student answered ‘5’. The teacher asked how he got to that answer, and the student responded, ‘I decided that instead of multiplying I would add the numbers.” The teacher would respond that it was 100% wrong. So too, if the Torah was given with the Oral Law, which includes a tradition (mesorah) of how the Torah should be learned, the result of any other method will not give us true Torah. Just as in the world of Mathematics there is no place for deviating from the way of solving the problem given, l’havdil, so too in Torah.

This idea extends to all those who question and think that they have a better approach than the traditional way of Torah learning. This was the mistake of Korach. The lesson that we learn is that the earth cannot accept someone into it who denies that there is something of meaning underneath the surface (Written Torah) as well. Rather that person will be buried under his own demented understanding.

May we merit to have the belief in our mesorah and by doing so, we will grow spiritually and physically.