Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

But no sooner did he hear himself speak than he remembered how Moses had held him by the hands and feet, and lifted him bodily, although he was much heavier than the prophet, proclaiming, ‘Now, Korah, art thou clean!’ An honour indeed, but he could not deny he had disliked the sensation of being raised, of being carried and cleansed and sprinkled by Moses, as if he were an infant or a ram, and all his material substance counted for nothing.

‘Besides,’ he went on, for the purpose of pacifying himself no less than his wife, ‘Moses purified his own flesh likewise, and that of his sons.’

‘A small price to pay, had he shaved every man in the house of his father, for making a fool of you. What hair worth speaking of does he have to lose? Or his sons, who must squint their eyes against the sun, their lashes are so thin? But even had they been a quarter as lustrous as you are — as you were — do you suppose he would have cared how far they were debased so long as he could debase you with them? You are a fool if you still do not know how much you gall him.’

Because Korah’s intelligence was secular, that does not mean it was free of superstition, untouched by the protocol of priestly ambition, or given over completely to his wife’s. ‘What I do know,’ he said, ‘is that you cannot call a man debased who has been sanctified — and what is more has been singled out for sanctification — according to the law.’

‘The law! Do not go on making an ass of yourself, Korah. Enough for one day!’

He forbore to argue. Shirtless, shoeless, hoodless, hairless, bare as a rat, he was uncertain what dignity was left to him to stand on.

He smiled, showing the gold in his teeth. Had his mouth been big enough to house three hundred teeth he would have crowned each one of them with gold. But even then he could not have flashed her a more sumptuous smile than he did now. At the last, his smile said, there is only one law I choose to obey.

She, though, his law-giver, was still arguing with him in her head. She stooped, gathered up his clothes, and held them out for him to see. Evidence of his barbering, needles of hair, nap, clusters of curls that might have been a child’s, still clung to his white linen.

‘What proof have we,’ she demanded that he tell her, except that she would not suffer him to tell her anything, ‘what proof have we that this Torah we hear so much about is not Moses’s invention? Do you never suspect its authenticity and origination? Are you not surprised that a God who roars out of the throat of a fiery mountain should bother, for our small behoof, to proliferate such trivialities — every day a new inanity, and every new inanity spawning every day a dozen more? Take this latest vagary into which your high priest has fallen: blue fringes. Blue fringes! Upon these garments of yours, which you are lucky I do not burn, I am to sew a tassel, and then upon the tassel I am to put a riband of blue. Tell me, Korah, why my seamstressing is a matter of importance to a busy God.’

All that is gold glisters in Korah’s mouth. ‘Angel, fringes ribanded with blue are to remind us, every time we look upon them, of the commandments of the Lord.’

‘You call this reasoning? Were I then to sew scorpions into your shirts and tell you that the Lord commanded them, would they too not bend your thoughts to heaven? And what is there in particular about the colour blue — and do not say, the sky — that lends it this magical property of a memorandum? If there is a virtue in blue wool, then let blue wool be brought out and we will clothe the congregation in it forthwith, and not be worrying ourselves with knots.’

For this, the rabbis of the Gemara would remember Korah’s wife.

‘Thus it is written,’ they would say, comparing her with the wife of On (the Husband of His Wife): ‘Every wise woman buildeth her house; but the foolish plucketh it down.’

Woe to her, and to hers, who speaketh against the fringe!

On her husband too, as of course on Sisobk the Scryer, her words made a strong impression.

The very next day Korah sought an audience with Moses. Two hundred and fifty of his followers accompanied him, among them — allowing that one who comes before in time is not disqualified from following in spirit — Sisobk. Garmented in tekhelet — vestments of forget-me-not blue that covered them from neck to ankle — Korah’s men flapped like a banner of insurrection outside God’s chosen prophet’s tabernacle.

Korah himself, though, a study in humming sapphire and sea-sick turquoise, began his questioning with exaggerated courtesy.

Korah: We have come to you to learn your ruling, Moses. To these garments is it required of us — on pain of our iniquity becoming a byword among nations — that we attach fringes?

Moses: That is the commandment.

Korah: A blue fringe?

Moses: Yes, blue.

Korah: It must be blue?

Moses: Blue to recall to you the sea, which will in turn recall to you the firmament, which will at last put you in mind of the Throne of Glory. Where sits He who brought you out of bondage to be your God. Yes — blue.

Korah: But if a single fringe of blue suffices to fulfil the commandment when the garment is white all over, or all over some other colour (which might equally, by the by, remind us of the firmament), then should not a garment which is already blue all over meet the conditions of the commandment more satisfactorily still? If we were to learn that the Lord preferred an offering of goat to an offering of a lamb, we would send out for goat, not cut Him up a lamb and stick whiskers to it.

Moses: The commandment specifies a fringe of blue. That is my ruling, as I interpret the intentions of the God of Israel.

It did not take at all long for the word to get about that, bald as he had become, the rich Levite, Korah, had made a fool of Moses.

Sisobk the Scryer hears about it centuries before it happened. Remarkable, even though he was there to verify it in person.

The following day Korah turned up with his company again, to request another ruling.

Korah: King Moses, if upon a man’s skin there be a white rising, or a bright spot, white and somewhat reddish, in size no bigger than a bean, is that man clean or unclean?

Moses: He is unclean.

Korah: And if the white rising or bright spot spreads and covers all his skin, is that man clean or unclean?

Moses: He is clean.

Korah: (turning to his company and, forgetting he no longer owns an eyebrow, arching that part of his face where an eyebrow once had been) One wonders whether such irrationality can have its origins in God. But I have another question. This mezuzah, which contains twenty-two lines of the Torah, and which you would have us affix at the entrance to our abodes…

Moses: Not I. It is the Lord God who has said, ‘And thou shalt write them upon the doorposts of thine house and upon thy gates.’

Korah: It will relieve us all to hear that the Lord God who has brought us out of bondage into this wilderness intends that we should one day live in houses. We had thought sand was become our natural habitat. (From Korah’s company murmurings, mirth, hollow as idols to the ears of Moses.) But be that as it may, tell me, Moses: if this mezuzah is to serve as a symbolic reminder, at our very portals, of His law — a foretaste, so to speak, before we enter — then presumably it is not necessary to have one on the doorposts of a house which already contains the sacred scrolls from which these twenty-two lines have been extracted.

Moses: A mezuzah is to be affixed at the entrance to every dwelling.

Korah: Without exception?

Moses: Without exception.

Korah: What you are saying, then, is that three hundred and seventy-eight portions of the Torah will not suffice to meet God’s prescription, whereas a mere twenty-two lines will do the job perfectly?