Tag Archives: Leadership

Korach, Numbers 16:1-18:32

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/korach

Brass Pans

By Rabbi Lazer Gurkow

As recounted in this week’s Torah portion, Korach led a rebellion against Moses and Aaron. Two hundred and fifty of Korach’s followers brazenly performed the rite of incense offering—a rite reserved only for the high priest. They were punished, but the brass pans they used in their misguided offering were salvaged. G‑d instructed that they be utilized as a covering for the altar. Why would a sinner’s pan be incorporated into the altar of atonement?

The simple reason given is that this would serve as a reminder to the nation never to engage in rebellion again. Yet there must be a deeper dimension, a positive aspect, to this remarkable twist in the tale.

The chassidic masters point out that every metal used in the building of the Tabernacle represented a human character trait. Gold is indicative of awe, silver of love, and brass of conviction and strength of character. Korach and his men were indeed made of brass, prepared as they were to sacrifice their life on the altar of conviction.

They backed the wrong horse, but they sure knew how to run. Their conviction was laudable though their choice was tragic. So G‑d instructed that the brass pans be incorporated into the altar itself, but the hot coals within it—also used to perform the incense rite—be discarded. This demonstrates that G‑d did not approve of the nature of their sacrifice, but appreciated the sacrifice itself.

The message to the nation was simple. Do not repeat Korach’s mistake, but do take a lesson from the manner in which he pursued it. Find that strength within yourself, but harness it to the service of G‑d.

Korach was given a gift, but he abused it. We need to utilize that very gift in a positive sense. Strength of character is handy when, for example, skeptics and detractors beset us and question our values.

When doubts cross our mind, when questions plague us, conviction sustains us till such time as we discover the answers. When our strength is eroded by temptations and craven delights, we rely on our inner reserves till our moment of weakness passes.

In short, when the ego, heart or mind loses enthusiasm, an unshakable faith will carry the day.

This Torah portion comes on the heels of the story we read last week, in which the nation was handed a forty-year sentence to wander the desert. It would take patience and long-term commitment to overcome this long and trying period. This strength of character was born out of the ashes of Korach’s tragedy.

Though Korach’s rebellion was ill-fated, it sparked a fire deep within the Jewish soul. If Korach could feel such conviction, then so could we. Buoyed by this conviction, the nation resolved to overcome the forty-year sentence and enter the promised land.

We too would do well to tear a page out our ancestors’ playbook. We too have been wandering for many years, and we too await the promise of return. With the conviction of a faith unshaken, let us resolve to anticipate the coming redemption speedily in our days, Amen.

Gurkow, Lazer. "Brass Pans." Chabad.org. (Viewed on June 21, 2014). http://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/395376/jewish/Brass-Pans.htm

Servant Leadership

By Rabbi Jonathon Sacks

“You have gone too far! The whole community are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is with them. Why then do you set yourselves above God’s congregation?” (Num. 16: 3).

What exactly was wrong in what Korach and his motley band of fellow agitators said? We know that Korach was a demagogue, not a democrat. He wanted power for himself, not for the people. We know also that the protestors were disingenuous. Each had their own reasons to feel resentful toward Moses or Aaron or fate. Set these considerations aside for a moment and ask: was what they said, true or false?

They were surely right to say, “All the community are holy.” That, after all, is what God asked the people to be: a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, meaning, a kingdom all of whose members are (in some sense) priests, and a nation all of whose citizens are holy.

They were equally right to say, “God is with them.” That was the point of the making of the Tabernacle: “have them make Me sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them” (Ex. 25: 8). Exodus ends with the words: “So the cloud of the Lord was over the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, in the sight of all the Israelites during all their travels” (Ex. 40: 38). The Divine presence was visibly with the people wherever they went.

What was wrong was their last remark: “Why then do you set yourselves above God’s congregation?” This was not a small mistake. It was a fundamental one. Moses represents the birth of a new kind of leadership. That is what Korach and his followers did not understand. Many of us do not understand it still.

The most famous buildings in the ancient world were the Mesopotamian ziggurats and Egyptian pyramids. These were more than just buildings. They were statements in stone of a hierarchical social order. They were wide at the base and narrow at the top. At the top was the king or pharaoh – at the point, so it was believed, where heaven and earth met. Beneath was a series of elites, and beneath them the labouring masses.

This was believed to be not just one way of organising a society but the only way. The very universe was organised on this principle, as was the rest of life. The sun ruled the heavens. The lion ruled the animal kingdom. The king ruled the nation. That is how it was in nature. That is how it must be. Some are born to rule, others to be ruled.

Judaism is a protest against this kind of hierarchy. Every human being, not just the king, is in the image and likeness of God. Therefore no one is entitled to rule over any other without their assent. There is still a need for leadership, because without a conductor an orchestra would lapse into discord. Without a captain a team might have brilliant players and yet not be a team. Without generals an army would be a mob. Without government, a nation would lapse into anarchy. “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in their own eyes” (Judges 17:6, 21:25).

In a social order in which everyone has equal dignity in the eyes of heaven, a leader does not stand above the people. He serves the people, and he serves God. The great symbol of biblical Israel, the menorah, is an inverted pyramid or ziggurat, broad at the top, narrow at the base. The greatest leader is therefore the most humble. “Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth” (Num. 12:3).

The name to this is servant leadership, and its origin is in the Torah. The highest accolade given to Moses is that he was “the servant of the Lord” (Deut. 34:5). Moses is given this title eighteen times in Tanakh as a whole. Only one other leader merits the same description: Joshua, who is described this way twice.

No less fascinating is the fact that only one person in the Torah is commanded  to be humble, namely the king:

When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken from that of the Levitical priests. It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites … (Deut. 17: 18-20)

This is how Maimonides describes the proper conduct of a king:

Just as the Torah has granted the him great honour and obligated everyone to revere him, so too it has commanded him to be lowly and empty at heart, as it says: ‘My heart is a void within me’ (Psalm 109:22). Nor should he treat Israel with overbearing haughtiness, as it says, ‘he should not consider himself better than his fellows’ (Deut. 17:20).

He should be gracious and merciful to the small and the great, involving himself in their good and welfare. He should protect the honor of even the humblest of people.

When he speaks to the people as a community, he should speak gently, as in ‘Listen my brothers and my people…’ (King David’s words in I Chronicles 28:2). Similarly, I Kings 12:7 states,  ‘If today you will be a servant to these people…’

He should always conduct himself with great humility. There is none greater than Moses, our teacher. Yet, he said: ‘What are we? Your complaints are not against us’ (Exodus 16:8). He should bear the nation’s difficulties, burdens, complaints and anger as a nurse carries an infant.

The same applies to all positions of leadership. Maimonides 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.” Maimonides adds to this last phrase: “like heathen kings.”[5] The polemical intent is clear. It is not that no one behaves this way. It is that this is not a Jewish way to behave.

When Rabban Gamliel acted in what his colleagues saw as a high-handed manner, he was deposed as Nasi, head of the community, until he acknowledged his fault and apologised. Rabban Gamliel learned the lesson. He later said to two people who declined his offer to accept positions of leadership: ‘Do you think I am giving you a position of honour [serarah]? I am giving you the chance to serve [avdut].” As Martin Luther King once said “Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve.”

C. S. Lewis rightly defined humility not as thinking less of yourself but as thinking of yourself less. The great leaders respect others. They honour them, lift them, inspire them to reach heights they might never have done otherwise. They are motivated by ideals, not by personal ambition. They do not succumb to the arrogance of power.

Sometimes the worst mistakes we make are when we project our feelings onto others. Korach was an ambitious man, so he saw Moses and Aaron as two people driven by ambition, “setting themselves above God’s congregation.” He did not understand that in Judaism to lead is to serve. Those who serve do not lift themselves high. They lift other people high.

Sakcs, Jonathon. "Servant Leadership." OU.org. (Viewed on June 21, 2014). http://www.ou.org/torah/parsha/rabbi-sacks-on-parsha/servant-leadership/

Tzav, Leviticus 6:1-8:36

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/tzav

Tzav 5774

By Ian Gamse

“So did Aaron and his sons, all the things which God had commanded by the hand of Moses.” (Vayikra, Leviticus 8:36)

The parasha ends with the account of the seven days during which the mishkan (the “tabernacle”) was dedicated – the culmination of six months of donations and crafstmanship. The eighth day will be the first day of Nisan, a new year and a new phase in the Israelites’ relationship with God. Rashi reads this final verse entirely positively: it comes to praise Aaron and his sons who have not deviated one iota from the instructions they were given.

Ramban, however, notices an oddity in the wording. The phrase that has been repeated many times in the account of the construction of the mishkan is “ka-asher tsivva”; here we have “asher tsivva”. The missing kaf makes a difference: whereas before everything had been done “just as God had commanded”, here it is merely “which God had commanded”. He accounts for the difference by reading forwards: on the next day, the eighth day, Aaron’s two elder sons will do something that they had not been commanded, bringing “strange fire” into the sanctuary and turning celebration into tragedy.

But what does he mean by making this comment at this stage? Presumably that the lapse was predictable and its cause already discernible – so we must ask what that cause was and why Aaron and his sons are appointed priests despite an apparent flaw.

I would like to suggest that what lies behind Ramban’s comment is an essential difference between Moses on the one hand and Aaron and his sons on the other. Moses – his head literally in the clouds – is able to exactly as God has commanded, with no interruption, no interference. The constant repetition of the phrase “just as God had commanded” is applied to things that Moses does himself and to the work done under his supervision. But the end of the seven days of dedicating the mishkan marks a transition: the mishkan moves from the world of Moses to the world of Aaron – a world that is fallible – a world in which the mishkan is not just an ever-present reminder of the immanence of God but an ever-present reminder of the golden calf, for which it atones.

Fallibility, however, may not be bad. The Kotsker rebbe cites Midrash Tanchuma: “Said the Holy One, blessed be He: if I wanted an offering, should I not instruct the angel Michael to offer Me an offering? But from whom do I ask? From Israel.” If what God wants is specific actions, says the Kotsker, He should ask the angels – beings without free choice who perform His will exactly. Instead, God instructs us, humans, who must put some effort into deciding to do what is required of us – and it’s that effort which is what God is looking for, even though it comes at the price of possible failure.

So perhaps we can read the Ramban’s words not as a critique of Aaron and his sons but as a celebration of the introduction of human fallibility, and thus human potential, into the pristine, sterile structure.

Gamse, Ian. "Tzav 5774." Limmud on One Leg. (Viewed on March 15, 2014). http://limmud.org/publications/limmudononeleg/5774/tzav/

On Not Trying to Be What You Are Not

By Rabbi Jonathon Sacks

The great leaders know their own limits. They do not try to do it all themselves. They build teams. They create space for people who are strong where they are weak. They understand the importance of checks and balances and the separation of powers. They surround themselves with people who are different from them. They understand the danger of concentrating all power in a single individual. But learning your limits, knowing there are things you cannot do – even things you cannot be – can be a painful experience. Sometimes it involved an emotional crisis.

The Torah contains four fascinating accounts of such moments. What links them is not words but music. From quite early on in Jewish history, the Torah was sung, not just read. Moses at the end of his life calls the Torah a song. Different traditions grew up in Israel and Babylon, and from around the tenth century onward the chant began to be systematized in the form of the musical notations known as taamei ha-mikra, cantillation signs, devised by the Tiberian Masoretes (guardians of Judaism’s sacred texts). One very rare note, known as a shalshelet (“chain”), appears in the Torah four times only. Each time it is a sign of existential crisis. Three instances are in Bereishit. The fourth is in our parsha. As we will see, the fourth is about leadership. In a broad sense, the other three are as well.

The first instance occurs in the story of Lot. Lot had separated from his uncle Abraham and settled in Sodom. There he had assimilated into the local population. His daughters had married local men. He himself sat in the city gate, a sign that he had been made a judge. Then two visitors came to tell him to leave. God was about to destroy the city. Yet Lot hesitates, and above the word for “hesitates” –vayitmahmah – is a shalshelet. (Genesis 19: 16). He is torn, conflicted. He senses that the visitors are right. The city is indeed about to be destroyed. But he has invested his whole future in the new identity he has been carving out for himself and his daughters. Had the angels not seized him and taken him to safety he would have delayed until it was too late.

The second occurs when Abraham asks his servant – traditionally identified as Eliezer – to find a wife for Isaac his son. The commentators suggest that he felt a profound ambivalence about his mission. Were Isaac not to marry and have children, Abraham’s estate would eventually pass to Eliezer or his descendants. Abraham had already said so before Isaac was born: “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?” (Genesis 15: 2). If Eliezer succeeded in his mission, bringing back a wife for Isaac, and if the couple had children, then his chances of one day acquiring Abraham’s wealth would disappear completely. Two instincts warred within him: loyalty to Abraham and personal ambition. Loyalty won, but not without a deep struggle. Hence the shalshelet (Genesis 24: 12).

The third brings us to Egypt and the life of Joseph. Sold by his brothers as a slave, he is now working in the house of an eminent Egyptian, Potiphar. Left alone in the house with his master’s wife, he finds himself the object of her desire. He is handsome. She wants him to sleep with her. He refuses. To do such a thing, he says, would be to betray his master, her husband. It would be a sin against God. Yet over “he refused” is a shalshelet, (Genesis 39: 8) indicating – as some rabbinic sources and mediaeval commentaries suggest – that he did so at the cost of considerable effort. He nearly succumbed. This was more than the usual conflict between sin and temptation. It was a conflict of identity. Recall that Joseph was now living in, for him, a new and strange land. His brothers had rejected him. They had made it clear that they did not want him as part of their family. Why then should he not, in Egypt, do as the Egyptians do? Why not yield to his master’s wife if that is what she wanted? The question for Joseph was not just, “Is this right?” but also, “Am I an Egyptian or a Jew?”

All three episodes are about inner conflict, and all three are about identity. There are times when each of us has to decide, not just “What shall I do?” but “What kind of person shall I be?” That is particularly fateful in the case of a leader, which brings us to episode four, this time about Moses.

After the sin of the golden calf Moses had at God’s command instructed the Israelites to build a sanctuary which would be, in effect, a permanent symbolic home of God in the midst of the people. By now the work is complete and all that remains is for Moses to induct his brother Aaron and his sons into office. He robes Aaron with the special garments of the high priest, anoints him with oil, and performs the various sacrifices appropriate to the occasion. Over the word vayishchat, “and he slaughtered [the sacrificial ram]” (Leviticus 8: 23) there is a shalshelet. By now we know that this means there was an internal struggle in Moses’ mind. But what was it? There is not the slightest sign in the text that suggests that he was undergoing a crisis.

Yet a moment’s thought makes it clear what Moses’ inner turmoil was about. Until now he had led the Jewish people. Aaron his older brother had assisted him, accompanying him on his missions to Pharaoh, acting as his spokesman, aide and second-in-command. Now, however, Aaron was about to undertake a new leadership role in his own right. No longer would he be a shadow of Moses. He would do what Moses himself could not. He would preside over the daily offerings in the tabernacle. He would mediate the avodah, the Israelites’ sacred service to God. Once a year on Yom Kippur he would perform the service that would secure atonement for the people from its sins. No longer in Moses’ shadow, Aaron was about to become the one kind of leader Moses was not destined to be: a High Priest.

The Talmud adds a further dimension to the poignancy of the moment. At the burning bush, Moses had repeatedly resisted God’s call to lead the people. Eventually God told him that Aaron would go with him, helping him speak (Ex. 4: 14-16). The Talmud says that at that moment Moses lost the chance to be a priest. “Originally [said God] I had intended that you would be the priest and Aaron your brother would be a Levite. Now he will be the priest and you will be a Levite.”

That is Moses’ inner struggle, conveyed by the shalshelet. He is about to induct his brother into an office he himself will never hold. Things might have been otherwise – but life is not lived in the world of “might have been.” He surely feels joy for his brother, but he cannot altogether avoid a sense of loss. Perhaps he already senses what he will later discover, that though he was the prophet and liberator, Aaron will have a privilege Moses will be denied, namely, seeing his children and their descendants inherit his role. The son of a priest is a priest. The son of a prophet is rarely a prophet.

What all four stories tell us is that there comes a time for each of us when we must make an ultimate decision as to who we are. It is a moment of existential truth. Lot is a Hebrew, not a citizen of Sodom. Eliezer is Abraham’s servant, not his heir. Joseph is Jacob’s son, not an Egyptian of easy-going morals. Moses is a prophet not a priest. To say Yes to who we are we have to have the courage to say No to who we are not. There is pain and conflict involved. That is the meaning of the shalshelet. But we emerge less conflicted than we were before.

This applies especially to leaders, which is why the case of Moses in our parsha is so important. There were things Moses was not destined to do. He would not become a priest. That task fell to Aaron. He would not lead the people across the Jordan. That was Joshua’s role. Moses had to accept both facts with good grace if he was to be honest with himself. And great leaders must be honest with themselves if they are to be honest with those they lead.

A leader should never try to be all things to all people. A leader should be content to be what he or she is. A leader must have the strength to know what he cannot be if he is to have the courage to be himself.

Sacks, Jonathon. "On Not Trying to Be What You Are Not." Rabbi Sacks on Parsha, Orthodox Union. (Viewed on March 14, 2014). http://www.ou.org/torah/parsha/rabbi-sacks-on-parsha/trying/