38 | JULY 21 • 2022 

I

t is a farsighted, selfless gesture. As 
Rashi comments: “This is to tell the 
praise of the righteous — that when 
they are about to leave this world, they put 
aside their personal needs and become pre-
occupied with the needs of the community.
” 
 
 
 Great leaders think about 
the long-term future. They 
are concerned with succes-
sion and continuity. So it was 
with Moses.
God tells Moses to appoint 
Joshua, “a man in whom is 
the spirit.
” He gives him pre-
cise instructions about how 
to arrange the succession:
“Take Joshua, son of Nun, a man in 
whom is the spirit, and lay your hand on 
him. Have him stand before Elazar the 
priest and the entire assembly and commis-
sion him in their presence. Give him some 
of your authority so the whole Israelite 
community will obey him … At his com-
mand he and the entire community of the 
Israelites will go out, and at his command 
they will come in.
” (Num. 27:18-21)
There are three actions involved here: [1] 
Moses was to lay his hand on Joshua, [2] 
have him stand before Elazar the priest and 
the entire assembly, and [3] give him “some 
of your authority [me-hodecha].
” What is 
the significance of this threefold process? 
What does it tell us about the nature of 

leadership in Judaism?
There is also a fascinating Midrash about 
the first and third of these gestures:
“
And lay your hand on him — this is like 
lighting one candle with another. Give him 
some of your authority — this is like emp-
tying one vessel into another.
” Bamidbar 
Rabbah 21:15
Beneath these enigmatic words is a fun-
damental truth about leadership.

A THREE-PART DIVISION
In L
’esprit Des Lois (1748), Montesquieu, 
one of the great political philosophers 
of the Enlightenment, set out his theory 
of the “separation of powers” into three 
branches: the legislature, the executive and 
the judiciary. Behind it lay a concern for 
the future of freedom if power were con-
centrated in a single source:
“Liberty does not flourish because men 
have natural rights, or because they revolt 
if their leaders push them too far. It flour-
ishes because power is so distributed and 
so organized that whoever is tempted to 
abuse it finds legal restraints in his way.”
Montesquieu’s source was not the Bible 
— but there is, in a verse in Isaiah, a strik-
ingly similar idea: “For the Lord is our 
judge; the Lord is our law-giver; the Lord 
is our king; he will save us.” Isaiah 33:22
This tripartite division can also be found 
in Devarim/Deuteronomy 17-18 in the 

passage dealing with the various leadership 
roles in ancient Israel: the king, the priest 
and the prophet. The Sages later spoke 
about “three crowns” — the crowns of 
Torah, priesthood and kingship. 
Stuart Cohen, who has written an 
elegant book on the subject, The Three 
Crowns, notes that “what emerges from the 
[biblical] texts is not democracy through-
out the political system, but a distinct 
notion of power-sharing at its highest 
levels. Neither Scripture nor early rabbinic 
writings express any sympathy whatsoever 
for a system of government in which a sin-
gle body or group possesses a monopoly of 
political authority.”
The three-fold process through which 
Joshua was to be inducted into office had 
to do with the three types of leadership. 
Specifically, the second stage — “Have 
him stand before Elazar the priest and the 
entire assembly and commission him in 
their presence” — had to do with the fact 
that Moses was not a priest. His successor 
had to be formally recognized by the rep-
resentative of the priesthood, Elazar the 
High Priest.

POWER AND INFLUENCE
Power and influence are often thought of 
as being the same kind of thing: those who 
have power have influence and vice versa. 
In fact, though, they are quite different. 

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

RABBISACKS.ORG

Influence
 and
Power 

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

