Afterword
Seven Principles of Jewish Leadership
What then is Jewish about Jewish leadership? Clearly, not everything is. The Torah candidly acknowledges our indebtedness to other sources of wisdom. It was Moses’ father-in-law, Yitro, a Midianite priest, who taught him a fundamental lesson in leadership – how to delegate. Jews were not the first people to have priests or kings. The first priests we encounter in the Torah were not members of the covenantal family: Abraham’s contemporary, Melchizedek, described as “a priest of the most high God” (Gen. 14:18), Potiphera, Joseph’s Egyptian father-in-law, a “priest of On” (Gen. 41:45), and Yitro himself. As for kings, the Torah foresaw that the Israelites would one day say, “Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us” (Deut. 17:14).
In general, leadership is associated in Judaism with ḥokhma, “wisdom,” which is the universal heritage of humankind in the image and likeness of God. The rabbis said, “If they tell you there is wisdom among the nations, believe it.”1Lamentations Rabba 2:13. We can learn much from the great classics on leadership, from the West and the East, the Greeks and Romans, alongside Confucius and Lao-Tzu.2Lao-Tzu is the source of one of the great truths about leadership: “If the leader is good, the people say, ‘The leader did it.’ If the leader is great, they say, ‘We did it ourselves.’” Nonetheless, there are features of Jewish leadership that seem to me important and distinctive.
1. Leadership is service
The highest accolade given to Moses is that he was “a servant of the Lord.” He is called by this description eighteen times in Tanakh. “Do you think that I am offering you authority [serara]?” said Rabban Gamliel to two of his colleagues who declined invitations to take on leadership roles, “I am offering you the chance to serve [avdut].”3Horayot 10a–b.
Robert Greenleaf, in his classic Servant Leadership,4Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness (New York: Paulist Press, 1977). derives the principle from a Buddhist story by Herman Hesse. Yet the idea of leadership as service is fundamental to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and explains the otherwise inexplicable, that humility is the highest virtue of a leader (Moses, we are told, was “very humble, more so than anyone else on earth,” Num. 12:3). The idea that humility is a virtue would have sounded paradoxical to the ancient Greeks, for whom the megalopsychos, the great-souled man, was a figure of effortless superiority with a strong sense of his own importance.5See Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999).
Judaism entered the world as an inversion of the highly hierarchical societies of the ancient world symbolised by the ziggurats of Mesopotamia (the Tower of Babel) and the pyramids of Egypt, visible symbols of an order narrow at the top, broad at the base. The Jewish symbol, the menora, was the opposite: broad at the top, narrow at the base, as if to say that the leader must hold the honour of the people higher than his own.
Martin Luther King put it well: “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve.” It is the cause we dedicate ourselves to and the people we serve that lift us, not our own high estimate of ourselves.
2. Leadership begins by taking responsibility
When we see something wrong, we can complain or we can act. Complaining does not change the world. Acting does. Judaism is God’s call to action, summoning us to become His partners in the work of creation.
The opening chapters of Genesis are about failures of responsibility. Confronted by God with their sin, Adam blames Eve; Eve blames the serpent. Cain says, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Even Noah, “righteous, perfect in his generations,” has no effect on his contemporaries.
By contrast, at the beginning of Exodus, Moses takes responsibility. When he sees an Egyptian beating an Israelite, he intervenes. When he sees two Israelites fighting, he intervenes. In Midian, when he sees shepherds abusing the daughters of Yitro, he intervenes. As an Israelite brought up as an Egyptian, he could have avoided each of these confrontations, yet he did not. He is the model of one who says: if no one else is prepared to act, I will.
Leading is about being active, not passive, choosing a direction, not simply following the person in front of us. Leaders do not complain, they do not blame others, nor do they wait for someone else to put it right. They act. They take responsibility. And they join with others, knowing that there are limits to what any individual can do. They engage and enlist those who feel, as they do, that there is something wrong that needs to be put right.
Leaders work with others. Only twice in the Torah does the phrase lo tov, “not good,” appear. The first is when God says, “It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). The second is when Yitro sees Moses leading alone and says, “What you are doing is not good” (Ex. 18:17). We cannot live alone. We cannot lead alone. Leadership is teamsmanship.
As a result, there is no one leadership style in Judaism. During the wilderness years there were three leaders: Moses, Miriam, and Aaron. Moses was close to God. Aaron was close to the people. Miriam led the women and sustained her two brothers. During the biblical era there were three different leadership roles: kings, priests, and prophets. The king was a political leader. The priest was a religious leader. The prophet was a visionary. So in Judaism, leadership is an emergent property of multiple roles and perspectives. Leaders work with people who are strong where they are weak. They do not feel threatened by people who are better at some things than they are. To the contrary, they feel enlarged by them. No one person can lead the Jewish people. Only together can we change the world.
3. Leadership is vision-driven
Before Moses could lead, he experienced a vision at the burning bush. There he was told his task: to lead the people from slavery to freedom. He had a destination: the land flowing with milk and honey. He had a double challenge: to persuade the Egyptians to let the Israelites go, and to persuade the Israelites to take the risk of going. The latter turned out to be as difficult as the former.
The book of Proverbs says, “Without a vision, the people perish” (29:18). The prophets were the world’s master visionaries, and their words inspire us still. In a lovely prophecy, Joel speaks about a time when “your old men will dream dreams, and your young men will see visions” (3:1).
Somehow Jews have always had visionaries to lift the people from catastrophe to hope: poets, philosophers, mystics – even the secular Zionists of the nineteenth century had something spiritual about their utopias. Joseph dreamed dreams. Jacob, alone at night, dreamed of a ladder stretching from earth to heaven. We are the people who were never cured of our dreams.
Vision gives dignity to our aspirations. Throughout Tanakh, only the bad people seek power for the sake of power. The good seek to avoid it. Moses insisted on his inadequacy. So did Isaiah and Jeremiah. Jonah tried to run away. Gideon, offered the chance to become Israel’s first king, said, “I will not rule over you nor will my son rule over you. God will rule over you” (Judges 8:23). It is the vision that matters, not the office, the power, the status, or the authority. Leaders are led by their vision of the future, and it is this that inspires others.
4. The highest form of leadership is teaching
If the supreme challenge of leadership is adaptive – getting people to embrace the need for change – then leading means educating: getting people to think and see in new ways. All three leadership roles in biblical Israel – king, priest, and prophet – had a teaching dimension. Every seven years, the king read the Torah to the people at a national gathering (Deut. 31:12). Malachi said about the priesthood, “The lips of a priest guard knowledge and men seek instruction from his mouth” (Mal. 2:7). The prophets were teachers to the people, guiding them through the wilderness of time.
The greatest moment in Moses’ career came in the last month of his life, when having led the people for forty years, he assembled them on the bank of the Jordan and delivered the speeches that constitute the book of Deuteronomy. There he rose to the greatest heights, telling the next generation of the challenges they would face in the Promised Land, setting forth his vision of the good society. That was when he became Moshe Rabbenu, “Moses our teacher.” The great leaders are educators, teaching people to understand the meaning of their time.
It follows that they themselves must learn. Of the king, the Torah says that he must write his own sefer Torah which “must always be with him, and he shall read from it all the days of his life” (Deut. 17:19). Joshua, Moses’ successor, was commanded: “Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night” (Josh. 1:8). Without constant study, leadership lacks direction and depth.
This is so even in secular leadership. Gladstone had a library of more than thirty thousand books. He read more than twenty thousand of them. Gladstone and Disraeli were both prolific writers. Winston Churchill wrote some fifty books and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Visit David Ben-Gurion’s house in Tel Aviv and you will see that it is less a home than a library with twenty thousand books. Study makes the difference between the statesman and the politician, between the transformative leader and the manager.
5. A leader must have faith in the people he or she leads
The rabbis gave a remarkable interpretation of the passage where Moses says about the Israelites, “They will not believe in me” (Ex. 4:1). They said that God reprimanded Moses for those words, saying: “They are believers the children of believers, but in the end you will not believe” (Shabbat 97a). A leader must have faith in the people he or she leads.
Authoritarian leadership is contrary to the basic principles of Judaism. When Solomon’s son Rehoboam tried to lead high-handedly, the kingdom split in two (I Kings 12). When Rabban Gamliel asserted his authority over his colleague R. Yehoshua in a way that slighted his dignity, the disciples removed him from office (Berakhot 27b). A leader who institutes a reign of fear is deemed to have no share in the World to Come.6Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva 3:13. Leaders need not believe in themselves, but they do need to believe in those they lead.
6. Leaders need a sense of timing and pace
When Moses asks God to choose his successor, he says: “May the Lord, God of the spirits of all flesh, choose a man over the congregation who will go out before them and come in before them, who will lead them out and bring them in” (Num. 27:16-17). Why the apparent repetition?
Moses is saying two things about leadership. A leader must lead from the front: he or she must “go out before them.” But a leader must not be so far out in front that, when he turns around, he finds no one following. He must “lead them out,” meaning, he must carry people with him. He must go at a pace that people can bear.
One of Moses’ deepest frustrations was the sheer time it takes for people to change. In the end, it would take a new generation and a new leader to lead the people across the Jordan and into the Promised Land. Hence R. Tarfon’s great saying: “It is not for you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it” (Mishna Avot 2:16).
Leadership involves a delicate balance between impatience and patience. Go too fast and people resist. Go too slow and they become complacent. Transformation takes time, often more than a single generation.
7. We are all summoned to the task
This is probably the deepest Jewish truth of all. The mission statement of the Jewish people – “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6) – surely means just this: a kingdom every one of whose members is in some sense a priest, and a nation every one of whose members is called on to be holy. We are called on to be a people of leaders.
At the heart of Jewish life is the principle formulated by the rabbis as kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, which means, in effect, “All Jews are responsible for one another” (Shevuot 39a). As R. Shimon bar Yoḥai put it: “When one Jew is injured, all Jews feel the pain.”7Mekhilta DeRabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai to Exodus 19:6. This means that when there is a problem within the Jewish world, none of us can sit back and say, “It’s not my responsibility.”8See Maimonides, Sefer HaMitzvot, positive command 205.
It is this more than anything else, I believe, that has led Jews to make a contribution to humanity out of all proportion to our numbers. We are a nation of activists. It also creates problems. It makes leadership within the Jewish community notoriously difficult. Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, famously said that he was head of a nation of a million presidents. We say in Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd,” but no Jew is a sheep.
The good news about the Jewish people is that we have many leaders. The bad news is that we have few followers. The first recorded words of a fellow Israelite to Moses were, “Who made you a ruler and judge over us?” (Ex. 2:14). Moses had not even dreamed of becoming a leader and already his leadership was being criticised. This means that leading within the Jewish community is never less than challenging. But that is how it is: according to the effort, said the sages, is the reward (Mishna Avot 5:23).
These are high ideals, so high that they can sound intimidating. But they should not be. We fall short. We stumble. But David Brooks gets it right when he says that “we are all stumblers, and the beauty and meaning of life are in the stumbling.”9David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Allen Lane, 2015), 268. We will never reach the stars but we can still be guided by them.
I began this book by explaining that I never thought of becoming a leader. It was a life-changing encounter with a great leader that persuaded me otherwise. I learned over the years that we make mistakes, but it is from our mistakes that we learn. You cannot get it right without first getting it wrong. If you lack the courage to fail, you will lack the courage to succeed.
It is from our worst mistakes that we grow. We learn humility. We discover that you cannot please everyone. We encounter resistances, and as with the body so with the soul: it is resistance training that gives us strength. What matters is not that we succeed, but that we enter the arena, are forced to fight with the weaknesses of our nature, that we put ourselves on the line, commit ourselves to high ideals, and refuse the easy options of cynicism, disillusion, or blaming others. The mere fact that we tried, and kept trying, and had faith in what we were striving to achieve, and never, despite the setbacks, lost that faith, in the end brings a surprising joy. Brooks again: “Joy comes as a gift when you least expect it. At those fleeting moments you know why you were put here and what truth you serve.”10Ibid., 270.
Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky end Leadership on the Line with a not dissimilar thought. Finding meaning in life comes from discovering ways “to contribute to the worldly enterprise, to enhance the quality of life for people around you…. Any form of service to others is an expression, essentially, of love.”11Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line, 220.
Somehow out of a life of struggle, the heroes and heroines of faith discovered how small we are, yet how great is the task to which we are called, and their example can light a flame in each of us, leading us to strive for something larger than the self, so that whether we succeed or fail, we know at least that our life was lit by its exposure to those great ideals of love and truth and service, that we made our contribution to our people’s story and helped heal some of the fractures of a still injured and imperfect world. “Don’t wait for Me,” whispered God to Abraham. “Go on ahead.”12See Rashi to Genesis 6:9. That is what He whispers to all of us, and in the going is the blessing that confers moral beauty on a life.