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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.

