symmetry

Korach Revolt Korach, the proto‑egalitarian, cried: All the community are holy… so why do you exalt yourselves? (Numbers 16:3). Chassidut explains that holiness is indeed everyone’s birthright, yet its light must be channeled through distinct roles—kohanim (priests), levi’im (levites), yisraelim (Israelites). Korach’s rejection of this divinely-ordained hierarchy and demand of undifferentiated equality challenged the boundaries, shattered those channels, and ruptured the very ground he stood on: the earth itself—symbol of structure and boundaries—opened to swallow him and his dream of boundless sameness. The equality that Korach craved can be described as symmetry. Imagine a perfectly symmetrical object, like a perfectly round ball. You can rotate it in any direction, and it will always look the same. In the language of mathematics, such “sameness” under a transformation (in our example, a rotation) is called [...]