Penn Conversation: Teshuva and Mass Incarceration

(1) Now Korah, son of Izhar son of Kohath son of Levi, betook himself, along with Dathan and Abiram sons of Eliab, and On son of Peleth—descendants of Reuben— (2) to rise up against Moses, together with two hundred and fifty Israelites, chieftains of the community....And Moses said, “By this you shall know that it was the LORD who sent me to do all these things; that they are not of my own devising...Scarcely had he finished speaking all these words when the ground under them burst asunder, (32) and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up with their households, all Korah’s people and all their possessions. (33) They went down alive into Sheol, with all that belonged to them; the earth closed over them and they vanished from the midst of the congregation.

(1) When the plague was over, the LORD said to Moses and to Eleazar son of Aaron the priest, (2) “Take a census of the whole Israelite community from the age of twenty years up, by their ancestral houses, all Israelites able to bear arms.” ... Born to Pallu: Eliab. (9) The children of Eliab were Nemuel, and Dathan and Abiram. These are the same Dathan and Abiram, chosen in the assembly, who agitated against Moses and Aaron as part of Korah’s band when they agitated against the LORD. (10) Whereupon the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up with Korah—when that band died, when the fire consumed the two hundred and fifty people—and they became an example. (11) The children of Korah, however, did not die....

...Rabba bar bar Ḥana said: One time I was walking on the road, and a certain villager said to me: Come and I will show you those from the assembly of Korah who were swallowed. I went and I saw two fissures in the ground from which smoke was emerging. The villager took a woolen fleece and dampened it with water and placed it on the tip of his spear and passed it over the fissures there. The fleece was singed, indicating the level of heat there. He said: Listen- what do you hear? And I heard that this is what they were saying: Moses and his Torah are truth, and they are liars. The villager said to him: Every thirty days Gehenna returns them to this place like meat cooking in a cauldron, and they say this: Moses and his Torah are truth, and they are liars.

Among the ways of repentance are, for the penitent to distance themselves exceedingly from the thing wherein they sinned, to have their identity changed, as if saying: "I am now another person, and not that person who perpetrated those misdeeds", to completely change their conduct for the good and straight path...