44 | JULY 20 • 2023
I
t was one of the great moments of per-
sonal transformation, and it changed not
only Moses but our very conception of
leadership itself.
By the end of the book of Bamidbar,
Moses’ career as a leader would seem to
be ending. He had appointed his succes-
sor, Joshua, and it would be Joshua, not
Moses, who would lead the people across
the Jordan into the Promised
Land. Moses seemed to have
now achieved everything
he was destined to achieve.
For him, there would be no
more battles to fight, no more
miracles to perform, no more
prayers to make on behalf of
the people.
It is what Moses did next that bears the
mark of greatness. For the final month of
his life, he stood before the assembled peo-
ple, and delivered the series of addresses
we know as the book of Deuteronomy or
D’varim, literally “words.
” In these address-
es, he reviewed the people’s past and fore-
saw their future. He gave them laws. Some
he had given them before but in a different
form. Others were new; he had delayed
announcing them until the people were
about to enter the land. Linking all these
details of law and history into a single over-
arching vision, he taught the people to see
themselves as an am kadosh, a holy people,
the only people whose sovereign and law-
giver was God Himself.
If someone who knew nothing about
Judaism and the Jewish people were to ask
you for a single book that would explain
both who Jews are and why they do what
they do, the best answer would be D’varim.
No other book so encapsulates and drama-
tizes all the key elements of Judaism as a
faith and way of life.
In a much-watched TED talk, and a book
with the same name, Simon Sinek says that
the transformative leaders are those who
“Start with Why.
” More poetically, Antoine
de Saint-Exupery said, “If you want to build
a ship, don’t drum up people together to
collect wood and don’t assign them tasks
and work, but rather teach them to long for
the endless immensity of the sea.
”
Through the addresses we read in the
book of D’varim, Moses gave the people their
Why. They are God’s people, the nation on
whom He has set His love, the people He
rescued from slavery and gave, in the form of
the commandments, the constitution of lib-
erty. They may be small, but they are unique.
They are the people who, in themselves,
testify to something beyond
themselves. They are the peo-
ple whose fate will defy the
normal laws of history. Other
nations, says Moses, will rec-
ognize the miraculous nature
of the Jewish story — and
so, from philosophers Blaise
Pascal to Nikolai Berdyaev and
beyond, they did.
In the last month of his life,
Moses ceased to be the liber-
ator, the miracle-worker, the
redeemer, and became instead
Moshe Rabbeinu, “Moses,
our teacher.
” He was the first
example in history of the lead-
ership type in which Jews have
excelled: the leader as teacher.
PLANTING A VISION
Moses surely knew that some
of his greatest achievements
would not last forever. The
people he had rescued would
one day suffer exile and per-
secution again. The next time, though, they
would not have a Moses to do miracles. So,
he planted a vision in their minds, hope in
their hearts, a discipline in their deeds and
a strength in their souls that would never
fade. When leaders become educators, they
change lives.
In a powerful essay, “Who is fit to
lead the Jewish people?” Rabbi Joseph
Soloveitchik contrasted the Jewish attitude
to kings and teachers as leadership types.
The Torah places severe limits on the power
of kings. They must not multiply gold or
wives or horses. A king is commanded “not
to consider himself better than his fellow
Israelites, nor turn from the law to the right
or to the left” (Deut. 17:20).
A king was only to be appointed at the
request of the people. According to Ibn
Ezra, the appointment of a king was permit-
ted, but not an obligation. Abarbanel held
that it was a concession to human frailty.
Rabbeinu Bachya regarded the existence of
a king as a punishment, not a reward. In
short, Judaism is, at best, ambivalent about
monarchy — that is to say, about leadership
as power.
On the other hand, its regard for teachers
is almost unlimited. “Let the fear of your
teacher be as the fear of heaven,
” says the
The Leader
as Teacher
Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks
SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH