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universal law that has governed the fate of
nations from the dawn of civilization to
today.
Nations are born, they grow, they flour-
ish; they become complacent, then corrupt,
then divided, then defeated, then they die,
to be remembered only in history books
and museums. In the case of Israel, small
and intensely vulnerable, that fate will hap-
pen sooner rather than later. That is what
Moses calls “the curse.
”
A VISION FOR THE FUTURE
The alternative is simple — even though it
is demanding and detailed. It means taking
God as our Sovereign, Judge of our deeds,
Framer of our laws, Author of our liberty,
Defender of our destiny, Object of our wor-
ship and our love. If we predicate our exis-
tence on something — some One — vastly
greater than ourselves then we will be lifted
higher than we could reach by ourselves.
But that demands total loyalty to God and
His law. That is the only way we will avoid
decay, decline and defeat.
There is nothing puritanical about
this vision. Two of the key words of
Deuteronomy are love and joy. The word
“love” (the root a-h-v) appears twice
in Exodus, twice in Leviticus, not all in
Numbers, but 23 times in Deuteronomy. The
word “joy” (with the root s-m-ch) appears
only once in Genesis, once in Exodus, once
in Leviticus, once in Numbers but 12 times
in Deuteronomy. Moses does not hide the
fact, though, that life under the covenant
will be demanding. Neither love nor joy
come on a social scale without codes of
self-restraint and commitment to the com-
mon good.
Moses knows that people often think
and act in short-term ways, preferring
today’s pleasure to tomorrow’s happiness,
personal advantage to the good of society
as a whole. They do foolish things, indi-
vidually and collectively. So throughout
Devarim he insists time and again that
the road to long-term flourishing — the
“good,
” the “blessing,
” life itself — consists
in making one simple choice: accept God as
your Sovereign, do His will, and blessings
will follow. If not, sooner or later you will
be conquered and dispersed and you will
suffer more than you can imagine. Thus,
Moses defined reality for the Israelites of his
time and all time.
THE LESSON FOR LEADERS
What has this to do with leadership? The
answer is that the meaning of events is
never self-evident. It is always subject to
interpretation. Sometimes, out of folly or
fear or failure of imagination, leaders get
it wrong. Neville Chamberlain defined
the challenge of the rise to power of Nazi
Germany as the search for “peace in our
time.
” It took a Churchill to realize that this
was wrong, and that the real challenge was
the defense of liberty against tyranny.
In Abraham Lincoln’s day, there were
any number of people for and against
slavery but it took Lincoln to define the
abolition of slavery as the necessary step to
the preservation of the union. It was that
larger vision that allowed him to say, in the
Second Inaugural, “With malice toward
none, with charity for all, with firmness in
the right as God gives us to see the right, let
us strive on to finish the work we are in, to
bind up the nation’s wounds.
” He allowed
neither abolition itself, nor the end of the
Civil War, to be seen as a victory for one
side over the other but instead defined it as
a victory for the nation as a whole.
I explained in my book on religion
and science, The Great Partnership, that
there is a difference between the cause of
something and its meaning. The search
for causes is the task of explanation. The
search for meaning is the work of inter-
pretation. Science can explain but it cannot
interpret. Were the Ten Plagues in Egypt
a natural sequence of events, or Divine
punishment, or both? There is no scientific
experiment that could resolve this question.
Was the division of the Red Sea a Divine
intervention in history or a freak easterly
wind exposing a submerged and ancient
riverbank? Was the Exodus an act of Divine
liberation or a series of lucky coincidences
that allowed a group of fugitive slaves to
escape?
When all the causal explanations have
been given, the quality of miracle — an
epoch-changing event in which we see
the hand of God — remains. Culture is
not nature. There are causes in nature, but
only in culture are there meanings. Homo
sapien is uniquely the culture-creating,
meaning-seeking animal, and this affects
all we do.
Viktor Frankl used to emphasize that our
lives are determined not by what happens
to us but by how we respond to what hap-
pens to us — and how we respond depends
on how we interpret events. Is this disaster
the end of my world or is it life calling on
me to exercise heroic strength so that I can
survive and help others to survive? The
same circumstances may be interpreted
differently by two people, leading one to
despair, the other to heroic endurance. The
facts may be the same, but the meanings
are diametrically different. How we inter-
pret the world affects how we respond to
the world, and it is our responses that shape
our lives, individually and collectively.
That is why, in the famous words of Max
De Pree, “The first responsibility of a leader
is to define reality.
”
Within every family, every community,
and every organization, there are tests,
trials and tribulations. Do these lead to
arguments, blame and recrimination? Or
does the group see them providentially, as
a route to some future good (a “descent
that leads to an ascent” as the Lubavitcher
Rebbe always used to say)? Does it work
together to meet the challenge?
Much, perhaps all, will depend on how
the group defines its reality. This in turn
will depend on the leadership or absence
of leadership that it has had until now.
Strong families and communities have a
clear sense of what their ideals are, and they
are not blown off-course by the winds of
change.
No one did this more powerfully than
Moses in the way he monumentally framed
the choice: between good and bad, life
and death, the blessing and the curse, fol-
lowing God on the one hand or choosing
the values of neighboring civilizations on
the other. That clarity is why the Hittites,
Canaanites, Perizzites and Jebusites are no
more, while the people of Israel still live,
despite an unparalleled history of circum-
stantial change.
Who are we? Where are we? What are we
trying to achieve and what kind of people
do we aspire to be? These are the questions
leaders help the group ask and answer, and
when a group does so together it is blessed
with exceptional resilience and strength.
The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks served as the
chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the
Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teachings have been
made available to all at rabbisacks.org. This essay was
written in 2014.