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On the Limits of Leadership
Parashat Eikev (Deuteronomy 7:12 - 11:25)
22 August 2005
David Segal
Good morning, and welcome, Class XVIII, to our first Wexner (Summer) Institute.
This portion was hard for me to read. I say that in part because it is not altogether very friendly to a “textbook” Reform reader, and in part because it is also just plain confusing. I actually got so uncomfortable while reading it that I was suddenly very grateful for last week’s parasha, because I needed an Ir Miklat / City of Refuge from this week’s parasha.
Let me give you a few examples of the chaos, confusion, and contradiction that discomfited me, and then I’ll try to make some sense of it.
1. The legacy of the Exodus
In the Reform Movement and especially at the Religious Action Center, we talk about the Exodus from Egypt as the foundational narrative behind our mandate for social justice. There are many ways to articulate it, but it usually goes something like this: “God led us out of the House of Bondage so that we may work to free all God’s people from injustice and oppression.” But in Eikev, the Exodus becomes a reminder that, with God’s help, the Israelites can defeat any foe. And that’s a nice way of putting it.
You shall destroy all the peoples that the Lord your God delivers to you, showing them no pity…. You need have no fear of them. You have but to bear in mind what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and all the Egyptians…. (Deut. 7:16&18)
This is not exactly the articulation of a universalist social justice mission that I was hoping for… But only a few chapters later, we find a different exhortation:
For the Lord your God … shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, providing him with food and clothing. You too must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Deut. 10:17-19)
That’s a piece I can hold onto. But how can that exist side-by-side with the earlier declamation of destructive xenophobia? And, anyway, if you show no mercy to the enemies you conquer and dispossess, it’s hard to imagine that there would even be any strangers left to love…
2. The brit
This parasha articulates the terms of Israel’s covenant with God in a particularly complicated and problematic way. The basic formulation here is: If you obey God’s commands, you will thrive materially and territorially. In return for keeping the commandments, God promises fruitfulness in child-bearing, abundance in harvests, and an end to diseases; this material prosperity is coupled with total territorial hegemony:
If, then, you faithfully keep all this Instruction that I command you, … the Lord will dislodge before you all these nations…. Every spot on which your foot treads shall be yours…. (Deut. 11:22&24)
But then we are reminded that the dispossession of these peoples is not due to the virtues of the Israelites:
[I]t is rather because of the wickedness of those nations that the Lord is dispossessing them… (Deut. 9:4)
So on the one hand, if the Israelites keep the covenant, in return they get the land God promised them in prosperity and perpetuity; on the other hand, they get the land because the current inhabitants have sinned greatly. So are the Israelites the beneficiaries of God’s justice or the agents of it? (It may be that this is a false dichotomy, but that is a subject for another discussion – which I welcome!)
3. The golden calf-dust
Here is an example of a small contradiction that, I think, speaks volumes. In recounting the incident of the golden calf, Moses reminds the Israelites:
As for that sinful thing you had made, the calf, I took it and put it to the fire; I broke it to bits and ground it thoroughly until it was fine as dust, and I threw its dust into the brook that comes down from the mountain. (Deut. 9:21)
Seems straightforward enough; so why would I highlight this verse in particular? In the Exodus description of this event, there is one additional – and, I think, crucial – detail:
[Moses] took the calf that they had made and burned it; he ground it to powder and strewed it upon the water and so made the Israelites drink it [emphasis added]. (Exodus 32:20)
* * *
I ruminated for quite some time about why this detail would be omitted, and then it clicked – of course Moses leaves out that unpopular detail about making the Israelites drink the golden calf-dust – he doesn’t want to remind them of that. For what kind of legacy would such a reminder leave behind?
If we apply similar thinking on a macroscopic level, the chaos of the parasha as a whole will start to make sense. Documentary hypotheses aside, all of the words of this parasha come from the mouth of Moses, which I had ignored on my first few readings. Given that, and the fact that Moses has already fulfilled God’s command to proclaim the words of Torah to the people, why does he do it again?
The key lies in last week’s parasha, when Moses entreated God to let him into the land, only to be flatly refused. At that point, something changed in Moses. He had been a fitting leader for the Israelites during their wandering – in the liminal stage between slavery and freedom. But now they stand on the threshold of Promise, and Moses is no longer the appropriate front-man to take that final step out of the liminal space of the wilderness – which is also the first step into nationhood and landedness. Moses, then, is a leader nearing the end of his term of leadership. Sadly, it seems that he doesn’t know how to let go, which is not surprising, considering that it’s the only role he has known his entire adult life.
I read Parashat Eikev as Moses’ unfortunate but all too understandable attempt to assert his leadership and establish his legacy one last time – which is one too many times. He takes it upon himself to sum up the commandments yet again, but not for all the right reasons; the product is a jumble of laws and decrees and promises and warnings.
Like I said, I think this context accounts for the rest of the chaos and confusion in the parasha. In other words, Moses is trying to do and be too many things at once. He speaks in sweeping statements that are impractical and imprecise. Returning to my first two examples, he wants to remind the Israelites of the legacy of the Exodus and the infinite redemptive power of God, lest they fear their future enemies. He also wants to ensure that they observe all the commandments and pursue justice in their new land. But the end result is a bewildering mishmash of fiercely particularistic battle-cries and glowingly universalistic mandates.
There is one more detail I need to mention, and it is the most tell-tale sign of Moses’ faltering leadership. That is, his deliberate and repeated revelation of his role in interceding with God on behalf of the Israelites. Three times he reminds them that he fended off God’s wrath against them and saved them from destruction. For example, 10:10, “and the Lord heeded me once again: the Lord agreed not to destroy you” (see also 9:18-20; 9:25ff.).
Rather than leaving the Israelites with a final, inspiring charge, Moses spins out this incoherent, overly personal, largely redundant monologue. It is a lesson in how not to step down from a leadership position when the time has come.
Obviously, at Wexner, we spend a lot of time talking about and working on how to lead. There is an essential element to good leadership that I think we take for granted, but that we would do well to remember: knowing when not to lead, when to step aside and let others take the reins, and to do so gracefully. One’s legacy is shaped not only by what one leaves behind, but by how one leaves it behind.
* * *
Lest you think I am being too hard on Moses, let me add one final thought. There is a tradition of struggling with Moses’ decision to reveal his intercessory role to the Israelites, thereby raising their esteem for him and diminishing the value of his “selfless” supplication. In the words of the Yalkut Yehudah (a three-volume Chumash commentary published in 1993 by Rav Yehuda Leib Ginsberg):
Why did Moses tell the people about his prayer and God’s answer? Did this not serve to aggrandize himself, inasmuch as without his telling no one would ever have known about it! He needed to teach us a lesson, namely, that when one prays for others such prayer is more likely to be answered than when one prays for one’s own sake. Note that, when Moses prayed for himself and asked that God reverse the judgment and let him enter the Promised Land, the Eternal cut him off by saying “Enough!” (Deut. 3:26). But, when he prayed for Israel for forty days and nights, God let him be and in the end relented.
As it is for prayer, so it is for leadership: we do it best when we do it for the sake of others. While the rest of this week we will be building leadership skills and asserting our capacity to lead, I submit that we should also listen for a still, small voice of humility. A warning to avoid letting a personal agenda affect how we lead. A caution against placing our own leadership positions above the interests of those we lead. And a reminder that even the greatest leaders don’t always get it right.
A belated shavua tov, and B’teavon.