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