Think about the last time something went spectacularly right for you. You made a good guess in Wordle or you took the route Waze didn’t recommend and by doing so, avoided a traffic jam. What do you do? You smile, you pump your fist, and you say, “Wow, I got lucky.” Now, flip the script. You drop your toast, and it lands butter-side down on your brand-new rug. What do you do then? You sigh, you look at the sky, and you say, “I was unlucky.” Notice the fascinating grammatical asymmetry. We say “I got lucky”, but we say “I was unlucky”. In standard English, good fortune is a verb of acquisition (“to get”), while bad fortune is a verb of existence (“to be”). Why? Because human psychology assumes that the universe has a baseline. We assume that a lack of luck is the steady-state. The default setting of the world is neutral and predictable. When something wildly positive happens, we view it as an active, external disruption of that baseline. You got luck: you came into possession of a rare commodity that intercepted your normal day. It is an unstable, fleeting event.

But when bad things happen, our ego shifts into survival mode. We internalize it as a state of vulnerability. To say “I was unlucky” frames us as passive victims temporarily existing in a flawed environment. In psychology, this is known as Attribution Theory. It describes how we attach meaning to events based on their stability. When we win, we love the unstable event: We got lucky! When we lose, we blame the external, stable environment: We were just temporarily stuck in a bad state. It is the ultimate psychological ego shield. This psychological bias – this dangerous misinterpretation of the “steady-state” versus the “active event” – is the secret engine behind the rebellion of Korach.

In the Portion of Korach, we find a wealthy, smart, and furious leader who gathers two hundred and fifty distinguished men to march up to Moshe and Aaron. Look at the words Korach uses [Bemidbar 16:3]: “You take too much upon yourselves, for the entire congregation are all holy, and G-d is in their midst! Why then do you lift........

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