Leadership for the sake of heaven

This week I visited the Mandel Leadership Institute’s website. As usual, the homepage featured three articles about recent events: the Bimat Mandel session on IDF ceremonies; a pilot program for the heads of youth movements in Israel,and an article welcoming the new fellows of the Mandel Scholars in Education program.I tried to read through the eyes of an outsider unfamiliar with the Mandel Institute, and the following thoughts occurred to me:

1. Wow!
2. What is this Institute? I've heard of the Mandel School for Educational Leadership, but the Army? Doctoral students? Youth movements? All in one place? What do all these things have in common?
By the way, this was no coincidence. Even if he'd entered the website a month ago, the casual visitor would have found a different, equally impressive selection: educational leadership development programs in the Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) community, discussions of Jewish peoplehood, and more.

So what do they all share?

I believe they share one thing: leadership for the sake of heaven

And what is leadership for the sake of heaven? I may have coined the phrase, but not the idea.

The idea is adapted from the Talmudic concept, “mahloket le’shem shamayim” – a dispute for the sake of heaven, the goal of which is not to defeat the other, but to strive together with him for the truth.

What then is leadership for the sake of heaven? It is leadership that aims not to exert power over the other, but to work together with him for the greater good.

The Mishna in Pirkei Avot (6:17) states that the antithesis of “a dispute for the sake of heaven” is the dispute described in next week’s Torah portion, that of Korach and his followers. Based on this interpretation, the only thing that mattered to Korach was the question of who has more power i.e., Why is Moshe in charge and not me?

At the Mandel Institute, the questions that occupy us are not “how to accumulate power” or “how  to win the rat race to this or that senior position,” bur rather “to what good am I striving and how can this vision be transformed into reality.”

This approach, of leadership for the sake of heaven, is the trait shared by all the Mandel Institute’s programs, and it stems from its founders’ worldview.

Some measure Mr. Mandel’s contribution to education in Israel in dollars. By that measure, he is undoubtedly one of the largest donors. The total sum amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars.

But, in my opinion, and I believe also in his opinion, Mr. Mandel’s true contribution to Israel cannot be not measured in dollars, or even in the number of programs or buildings bearing his name, and those of his brothers.

The sole, relevant measure for him is: “How much good are we doing in the world? And can we do more?”

The programs and institutions, including the Mandel Leadership Institute, are a means, not an end. The end of our endeavor is a State of Israel that is more just and truer to its Jewish and humanist values – a State of Israel where all its citizens live in dignity.

Dear graduates,

A wise man once said, “It’s all about who.”

In the spirit of leadership for the sake of heaven, I would add: “It’s all about who, but it’s not all about you.”

You are talented people, each and every one of you. And I say this on the basis of personal acquaintance. But your, and our, success will not be measured by how far you go as individuals. It will be measured by how much good you do along the way.

I know that you will succeed, so there is no need to wish you success. I wish for you only that the journey be surprising and inspiring.

Taken from Dr. Eli Gottlieb’s Speech at the Mandel Leadership Institute Graduation Ceremony on June 10, 2014 at the Bible Lands Museum 

The Twilight Zones of Leadership

At the start of the Institute’s academic year in September, I mentioned a mishna in Masechet Avot (“Ethics of the Fathers”) that talks about ten things that were created during twilight.

One of them is the “mouth of the ass”, which appears in this week’s Torah portion, Parshat Balak. The ass in question belongs to Bilam, and when Bilam beats her she reprimands him, as it is written (Numbers 22: 27-28):

And Bilam was furious and beat the ass with his stick. Then the Lord opened the ass’s mouth, and she said to Bilam, “What have I done to you that you have beaten me these three times?”

We at the Mandel Leadership Institute are experts at creations such as the mouth of the ass.

Not because Mandel Foundation president, Professor Reinharz, is writing a book about the donkey in history, and not, heaven forbid, because the Institute is a production line for talking asses, but because the Institute is a place – just like twilight is a time – in which special things are created.

Just like twilight is neither day nor night, but a kind of threshold between them, so, too, the Mandel Leadership Institute is a sort of threshold – a liminal borderline, a twilight zone: between academia and the professional field; between vision and reality; between where you came from and where you’re going; between who you used to be, and who you will become. It’s a place where the obvious and evident are no longer taken for granted, a creative space in which exceptional, groundbreaking things are created.

It’s no coincidence that MLI is a threshold. Leadership and education are both activities that take place in thresholds: between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between present and future, between what people can do and what's beyond their capacity.

The role of leaders and educators is to bring people to the threshold and help them cross it, and reach a goal that is sometimes difficult even to imagine before one sets off on the journey.

MLI is a threshold, and thresholds are fragile places; that's why there are gatekeepers. Outside forces can easily break through and destroy the safe spaces created inside. And just as easily, those inside can shut themselves off into stifling seclusion, becoming deaf and blind to what's happening outside.

My wish for our alumni and graduates, is that they succeed in taking back with them, to the stormy vitality of the field, the threshold spirit that they experienced at the Institute, and that they will be “threshold people”: committed but not dogmatic; open, but also determined; courageous, but also modest; leaders who are not dragged along with the herd, but who also don’t cut themselves off from the community. It’s a difficult challenge, but one they can overcome. May they succeed and thrive!

Taken from Dr. Eli Gottlieb’s Speech at the Mandel Leadership Institute Graduation Ceremony on June 17, 2013 at the Israel Museum 

Sarah's Two Lives

As you have no doubt noticed, Hebrew isn’t my mother tongue. This fact is accompanied by certain interesting phenomena. When I read a text in Hebrew, all sorts of strange translations go through my head, the grammatical basis for which is a little shaky, to say the least.

An example of this is when, as an elementary school student in London towards the end of the 1970s, my chumash teacher asked me to translate the first verse of this week’s Torah portion.

וַיִּהְיוּ חַיֵּי שָׂרָה, מֵאָה שָׁנָה, וְעֶשְׂרִים שָׁנָה, וְשֶׁבַע שָׁנִים, שְׁנֵי חַיֵּי שָׂרָה

I tried my best, but it’s harder than it looks. You should try it yourselves sometime. At any rate, what came out was this:

“And Sarah’s lives were one hundred years and twenty years and seven years – Sarah’s two lives.”

I knew something was wrong here, and I started to wonder aloud: “Did Sarah really have two lives? Or perhaps she had three?! – one that lasted a hundred years, another that lasted twenty, and another that lasted seven!”

“Which is it?” I asked my teacher, “three or two?”

After my classmates had picked themselves up off the floor and stopped laughing at me – which took only about half an hour or so – the teacher corrected me and explained that, despite the strange sentence structure and the use of the word “shnai” in place of the more common “shnot” for “years”, the verse’s meaning was actually very simple: Sarah died at the age of 127.

But from that day on, the question has continued to trouble me. Even today, as a psychologist and educator interested in issues of identity, I continue to wonder: Can a person have more than one life? And if so, must these multiple lives come one after the other, or one at the expense of the other? Or can one live multiple lives simultaneously, such that they actually complement one another or strengthen one another?

As you can see, Freud was right: Our childhood traumas do indeed define us!

Anyway, I’ve continued studying the issue, and I’ve discovered that, yes, indeed, people really can live multiple lives simultaneously. Moreover, I’m becoming convinced that this ability is a necessary condition for educational leadership in the State of Israel today. Take, for example, the graduates in the clips we screened this evening. There is not a single one among them who does not skip between contrasting worlds, or whose professional life does not cross all sorts of boundaries.

The greatness of the Mandel Leadership Institute, and the greatness of its graduates, is our ability to live multiple lives simultaneously:

Lives of theory and lives of practice;

Lives of empathy and lives of critique;

Lives of vision and lives of reality;

Lives of commitment and lives of openness;

Lives of courage and lives of modesty;

Lives which have their feet planted on the ground, and which reach for the sky.

My wish for our graduates this year, is that they will continue, even in the stormy world beyond the Mandelian bubble, to live, each day, these multiple lives. Yes, lives like these are more complicated. But they are also much richer.

Taken from Dr. Eli Gottlieb’s address at the MLI Graduation Ceremony on November 6, 2012, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Mandel School for Educational Leadership