40 | SEPTEMBER 1 • 2022

A

t a dinner to celebrate the work of a
communal leader, the guest speaker
paid tribute to his many qualities:
his dedication, hard work and foresight.
As he sat down, the leader leaned over and
said, “You forgot to mention one thing.
”
“What was that?” asked the
speaker. The leader replied,
“My humility.
”
Quite so. Great leaders
have many qualities, but
humility is usually not one of
them. With rare exceptions
they tend to be ambitious,
with a high measure of self-
regard. They expect to be obeyed, honored,
respected, even feared. They may wear their
superiority effortlessly — Eleanor Roosevelt
called this “wearing an invisible crown” —
but there is a difference between this and
humility.
This makes one provision in our parshah
unexpected and powerful. The Torah is
speaking about a king. Knowing, as Lord
Acton put it, that power tends to corrupt
and absolute power corrupts absolutely, it
specifies three temptations to which a king
in ancient times was exposed. A king, it
says, should not accumulate many horses
or wives or wealth — the three traps into
which, centuries later, King Solomon even-
tually fell. Then it adds:
“When [the king] is established on his
royal throne, he is to write for himself on
a scroll a copy of this Torah … It is to be
with him, and he is to read it all the days of

his life so that he may learn to be in awe of
the Lord his God and follow carefully all the
words of this law and these decrees and not
feel superior to his brethren or turn from the
law to the right or to the left. Then he and
his descendants will reign a long time in the
midst of Israel.
” Deut. 17:18-20
If a king, whom all are bound to honor,
is commanded to be humble — “not feel
superior to his brethren” — how much more
so the rest of us. Moses, the greatest leader
the Jewish people ever had, was “very hum-
ble, more so than anyone on the face of the
earth” (Num. 12:3). Was it that he was great
because he was humble or humble because
he was great? Either way, as R. Johanan said
of God himself, “Wherever you find his
greatness there you find his humility.
”

A GENUINE REVOLUTION
This is one of the genuine revolutions
Judaism brought about in the history of
spirituality. The idea that a king in the
ancient world should be humble would have
seemed farcical. We can still today see, in
the ruins and relics of Mesopotamia and
Egypt, an almost endless series of vanity
projects created by rulers in honor of them-
selves. Ramses II had four statues of himself
and two of Queen Nefertiti placed on the
front of the Temple at Abu Simbel. At 33
feet high, they are almost twice the height of
Lincoln’s statue in Washington.
Aristotle would not have understood the
idea that humility is a virtue. For him, the
megalopsychos, the great-souled man, was

an aristocrat, conscious of his superiority
to the mass of humankind. Humility, along
with obedience, servitude and self-abase-
ment, was for the lower orders, those who
had been born not to rule but to be ruled.
The idea that a king should be humble was
a radically new idea introduced by Judaism
and later adopted by Christianity.
This is a clear example of how spirituality
makes a difference to the way we act, feel
and think. Believing that there is a God in
whose presence we stand means that we are
not the center of our world. God is. “I am
dust and ashes,
” said Abraham, the father
of our faith. “Who am I?” said Moses, the
greatest of the prophets. This did not render
them servile or sycophantic. It was precisely
at the moment Abraham called himself
dust and ashes that he challenged God on
the justice of His proposed punishment of
Sodom and the cities of the plain. It was
Moses, the humblest of men, who urged
God to forgive the people and, if not, “Blot
me out of the book You have written.
” These
were among the boldest spirits humanity
has ever produced.
There is a fundamental difference
between two words in Hebrew: anivut,
“humility,
” and shiflut, “self-abasement.
” So
different are they that Maimonides defined
humility as the middle path between shiflut
and pride. Humility is not low self-regard.
That is shiflut. Humility means that you are
secure enough not to need to be reassured
by others. It means that you don’t feel you
have to prove yourself by showing that you
are cleverer, smarter, more gifted or success-
ful than others. You are secure because you
live in God’s love. He has faith in you even
if you do not. You do not need to compare
yourself to others. You have your task, they
have theirs, and that leads you to cooperate,
not compete.

SEEING THE VALUE IN OTHERS
This means that you can see other people
and value them for what they are. They are
not just a series of mirrors at which you
look only to see your own reflection. Secure
in yourself, you can value others. Confident
in your identity, you can value the people
not like you. Humility is the self turned out-
ward. It is the understanding that “It’s not
about you.
”
Already in 1979, the late Christopher
Lasch published a book entitled The Culture

Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks

The Greatness
of Humility

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH