What Are You Actually Accusing Yourself Of?

When The Accusation Is a Confession

Think about the last time you had a grievance with someone. When the emotion rose up in you so fast and so hot that it felt like it was already waiting there.

Now, ask yourself: what am I accusing myself of? Yes, you heard me right.

Not them. Yourself.

Because if the Torah this week teaches us anything, it is that the accusations we level at other people are almost never only about the other person. They are maps. Imperfect, emotionally distorted, sometimes completely unconscious, maps of the thing inside us that has not yet been named.

Korach is one of the most vivid characters in all of Torah. He is brilliant. He is charismatic. He has a genuinely compelling argument. And he is utterly, catastrophically blind to himself (and so is Moses, btw)

And in that blindness, he is one of the most human figures the Torah ever gave us.

The rebellion opens with a sentence that sounds righteous.

“You have taken too much for yourselves. The entire community is holy, every one of them, and God is with them. Why do you raise yourselves above the assembly of God?” (Numbers 16:3)

Rav lachem. You have taken too much.

Korach is speaking to Moses and Aaron. He is accusing them of arrogance, of hoarding power, of placing themselves above a people that is entirely, equally holy. And again, theologically, he is not wrong. The idea that every person carries divine holiness is not a radical fringe position. It is mainstream Jewish thought. The Baal Shem Tov built a whole movement on it.

So why does the Torah name Korach’s dispute as the paradigmatic example of a machloket she’lo l’shem shamayim, a controversy / an argument not for the sake of heaven? Why does the earth open and swallow him?

Because Moses, in one of the quietest and most devastating moves in all of Torah, simply reflects the accusation back.

Moses replies: “It is you, sons of Levi, who have taken too much” (Numbers 16:7). The same words, mirrored back.

Moses doesn’t argue the theology. He doesn’t defend himself. He holds up a mirror and says: Look at what you just said. Now look at who is saying it.

Often, the loudest accusation is always a confession

Carl Jung called it the shadow, the parts of ourselves we cannot consciously tolerate, which we then project outward onto other people with remarkable precision. We don’t project randomly. We project specifically. The thing that enrages us most in someone else is almost always the thing we have most thoroughly disowned in ourselves.

The person who cannot stop talking about other people’s arrogance is usually sitting on an enormous hunger for recognition that they don’t know how to admit. The one who is convinced everyone around them is selfish is often someone who has never given themselves permission to want anything at all. The one who says you have taken too much is often someone who believes, in the deepest and most unexamined part of themselves, that they deserve more than they have.

This is not an insult. It is a clear reflection. And like most accurate reflections, it is uncomfortable precisely because it is true.

The Midrash shares what Korach never voiced: he felt passed over. His cousin Elizaphan ben Uzziel, younger and seemingly less qualified, received the leadership role Korach coveted. Korach never named his wound; he built a theology around resentment, gathered supporters, and disguised personal hurt as a spiritual principle.

And this is where Korach becomes genuinely dangerous. Not because he was wrong about holiness. But because unexamined resentment doesn’t stay private. It finds a dangerous way to come out. It builds a movement. It gathers followers who have their own wounds, their own passed-over moments, burning somewhere inside, and organizes all that pain into something that, from the outside, looks like a righteous cause.

The most destructive force in any community, in any family, in any relationship, in any room like this one is not open conflict. Its resentment is neither expressed nor addressed.

So, what happens when we finally get honest?

So few people, then and now, ask the simple, terrifying, liberating question that sits at the center of this entire story. What do I actually want?

Not: what is wrong with Moses? Not: what is wrong with the structure? Not: why does everyone else have more than me? What do I, Korach, son of Izhar, son of Kohath, son of Levi — actually want? What is the desire underneath the grievance? What is the longing underneath the rage?

The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote that most of what we call our problems are, in fact, our desires in disguise. desires so frightening or so vulnerable that we cannot afford to present them directly, so we present them sideways, as accusations, as complaints, as demands that other people change so that we don’t have to feel what we feel.

Korach wanted to matter. He wanted to be chosen. That is not a shameful want. That is a deeply human one. But he could never say it. So instead he said: rav lachem. You have taken too much. And in saying that, he took everything from himself. So, what to do with your own rav lachem?

Of course, I am not standing here to talk about Korach.

I am standing here because every single person in this room has a rav lachem living somewhere inside them. A grievance that has been running so long it feels like a personality trait. An accusation about someone else that is actually a confession about yourself. A desire so vulnerable that you turned it into a complaint because complaints feel safer than longing.

I want to offer you something tonight that is simple, and hard, and I believe genuinely transformative.

When you notice the next rav lachem rising in you, and you will notice it! Because you are paying attention now, and my funny Belgian voice can live free in your head, I want you to do three things.

First: name the accusation exactly. Not generally. Specifically. Not “they always take too much” but what, precisely, are they taking? Attention? Credit? Space? Love? Freedom? The more specific you can get, the closer you are to the real thing underneath.

Second: turn it around. If you are accusing someone of taking too much, ask yourself honestly: where in your life do you believe you are not allowed to take enough? Where have I shrunk? Where have I not asked for what I wanted because I decided in advance that I didn’t deserve it, or that it wouldn’t be given, or that wanting it at all made me someone I didn’t want to be?

Third, and this is the hardest one: ask the question Korach never asked. What do I actually want? Not what I should want. Not what would be acceptable to want. What do I, underneath all of this, actually want? And then, with whatever courage you can gather — say it. To someone. To God. Look at yourself in the mirror. Say what you want out loud before it becomes a movement.

Because the wound that gets named loses most of its power. The desire that gets spoken can actually be pursued. When we contend with our desires, and it comes out, honestly, vulnerably, it becomes a prayer.

Lastly, there is a particular kind of moment in June that I think this parasha speaks to directly, even though it was written three thousand years before anyone marched for it. Korach said: “ The entire community is holy, every one of them. He was wrong to weaponize it. But he was not wrong to say it. And every June, when this community and so many others celebrate Pride, I think we are watching people reclaim a sentence that has too often been denied them , not as a power grab, not as ego, but as a simple, true, and overdue declaration: I am also holy. My life, my love, who I am, this too carries the image of God. Korach turned that truth into a coup. Pride, at its best, turns it back into what it always should have been: not a rebellion against anyone, but a refusal to keep disappearing. We get to say it differently today and every day. We get to say it as a blessing, all of us, exactly as we are, already sacred, with nothing to prove and nothing to take. Let it clack with a roar, let it reflect a million ways from the disco ball, let it scream with enthusiasm, and let it shout strength from our leather straps… holiness lives everywhere in all of us! You know how I know? Torah said so!

Shabbat shalom