Lessons in Leadership: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible (Covenant & Conversation Book 8)

Great leaders think long-term and build for the future. That has become all too rare in contemporary secular culture with its relentless focus on the moment, its

great leader has the responsibility to both be an ambassador and inspire his or her people to be ambassadors as well.

Praise gives people the confidence to let go of the negative aspects of their character and reach their full potential.

No less real, though, is fear of success. We want to succeed, so we tell ourselves and others. But often unconsciously we fear what success may bring: new responsibilities, expectations on the part of others that we may find hard to fulfil, and so on. So we fail to become what we might have become had someone given us faith in ourselves.

The Rambam lists among those who have no share in the World to Come someone who “imposes a rule of fear on the community, not for the sake of Heaven.” Such a person “rules over a community by force, so that people are greatly afraid and terrified of him,” doing so “for his own glory and personal interests.” The

As he put it, “An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.” People in a crowd become anonymous. Their conscience is silenced. They lose a sense of personal responsibility. Crowds are peculiarly prone to regressive behaviour, primitive reactions, and instinctual behaviour.

Leaders need confidants, people who “will tell you what you do not want to hear and cannot hear from anyone else, people in whom you can confide without having your revelations spill back into the work arena.”

“Do you think that I am offering you authority [serara]? I am offering you the chance to serve [avdut]” (Horayot 10a–b). As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve.”6

leader does not stand above the people. He serves the people, and he serves God. The

is easy to find God in total seclusion and escape from responsibility. It is hard to find God in the office, in business, in farms and fields and factories and finance. But it is that challenge to which we are summoned: to create a space for God in the midst of this physical world that He created and seven times pronounced good.