A New and Different Year

In many cultures, New Year is a time when people reflect on past failings and resolve to change themselves for the better. The Jewish tradition is no exception. New Year (rosh hashanah) marks the beginning of a ten-day period of penitence that culminates in the Day of Atonement (yom kippur). Indeed, in Hebrew, the word for “year” (shanah) is connected etymologically to the word for “change” (shinui); both derive from the root שנ"י.

Change isn’t easy. It requires us to face uncomfortable realities. In the words of David Bowie, to change we have to “turn and face the strange.” The strange might be a new path, a new perspective, people different to us, or some aspect of ourselves that we previously ignored. Unless we turn to face them, however, opportunities to change can easily pass us by.

Bowie was a master of self-reinvention. The three clips below, each one from a different decade, represent just a small selection of his many styles and personas. Yet even he acknowledged that change is scary. To my ears, at least, fear of the strange is precisely what his stuttering delivery of the word “Changes” in each chorus conveys.

In the coming year, may we have the humility to recognize our need to change and the courage to face the strange.

Wishing us all a good, and different, year

Shanah tovah veshonah
Eli

Big people

I learned a few minutes ago that Bambi Sheleg died.

Bambi was small in physical stature but big in all the ways that matter: Courageous, imaginative, humane, passionate, a believer in people and their capacity to work together to create a better world.

Bambi was not only a big person herself. She also had a good nose for bigness in others. I was reminded of this quality the last time I saw Bambi, a few weeks ago, when we interviewed candidates together for a leadership development program. After one such interview, she turned to me and said: “I know he seemed almost pathologically self-critical, but that one will move mountains.” I’m sure she was right. She would know.

I will miss Bambi’s rare combination of moral certainty and attentiveness to voices different to her own. I will miss her insight, her warmth, her energy and her optimism. But most of all, I will miss her bigness.

May her memory be a blessing.

Compared to what?

Each year, a few days before Memorial Day, Israel’s Ministry of Defense publishes an updated count of fallen soldiers. Their tally includes not only soldiers killed in combat or during service, but also citizens killed in war or in terrorist activity. Indeed, it includes those who fell in acts of nationalist violence prior to the establishment of the State of Israel – going all the way back to 1860.

According to the Ministry of Defense, the total number of fallen stands today at 23,447. That’s a big, sad number. And it doesn’t include the suffering caused to tens of thousands of injured veterans or to the 16,307 bereaved families.

One of the most important things I learned from Prof. Seymour Fox, of blessed memory, was that when it comes to numbers, one should always ask: “Compared to what? Is that a lot or a little?” On its own, a number has no size; it’s neither big nor small. Big and small are relative concepts.

The story we tell about a given number depends, therefore, on the other numbers we choose as our points of reference.

Today, the story I wish to tell compares the number of Israel’s fallen with the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis in just two days, in Kiev and a nearby ravine, Babi Yar, on September 29-30, 1941. Note: This happened before the Wannsee Conference, the Final Solution or the establishment of the death camps.

According to Yad Vashem’s database, 33,771 of Kiev’s Jews were murdered in those two days alone.

When the sirens sound today, and I stand to attention, I will be focusing on my gratitude to those who gave their lives, and who risk their lives today, to ensure there won’t be another Babi Yar.

Inconceivable numbers, small stories

In my Passover greeting this year I discussed the connection between counting and recounting. I wrote: “Like counting, storytelling involves placing things in sequence. Unlike counting, however, storytelling injects the sequence with meaning.”

When it comes to commemorating those murdered in the Holocaust, the numbers make it hard for us to find any kind of meaning. The numbers are inconceivable: 6 million Jews, 1.5 million children, 1.1 million at Auschwitz, and on and on. Astronomical numbers. We can barely imagine them, let alone make sense of them.

This problem has inspired all kinds of creative – and sometime controversial – attempts to represent through art the number of murdered. See for example these attempts to represent through buttons or soda-can ring-pulls the number of those killed in the Holocaust.

Personally, I prefer to reverse the direction of sense-making. Rather than trying to make the number of murdered more concrete, I seek meaning in the individual stories out of which the astronomical numbers are made. It is precisely in the small details of personal stories that I begin to grasp, and gradually digest the immensity of the disaster.

This year, when the siren sounds on Holocaust Memorial Day, and I stand to attention, I will be focusing on the small numbers, without which I would not be here today: The number of kilometers between Antwerp and Dunkirk; the number of hours between my grandfather hearing that the Germans were advancing rapidly towards the coast and the departure of the last boat to Britain; the amount of cash in my grandfather’s pocket, which sufficed to convince the boat’s captain to take his young family aboard, even though it was by this time illegal to take on civilian passengers. All those small numbers, without which, my grandparents, and my uncle Joseph, would have been added to the numbers we struggle to conceive.

On Counting and Recounting

"Even if we are all wise, understanding and knowledgeable, we are still obliged to recount the Exodus from Egypt." (From the Passover Haggadah)

"And you shall count for yourselves … seven complete weeks." (Leviticus 23:15)

Two Passover mitzvoth that seem unrelated turn out to share a common core. One mitzvah obliges us to recount the story of the Israelites' Exodus from Egypt. The other obliges us to count seven complete weeks from Passover to Pentecost.

A connection between counting and recounting exists not only in English. Consider, for example, the connection between compter and raconter in French, and the term raconteur, which means storyteller in both languages.

In Hebrew, the connection is even more obvious; the verbs סָפַר and סִפֵּר are different conjugations of the same root. Indeed, the particular grammatical structure of these variants suggests that the Hebrew language treats storytelling as an intensified form of counting, or, if you will, the act of making something count.

Like counting, storytelling involves placing things in sequence. Unlike counting, however, storytelling injects the sequence with meaning; it is this that makes a story more than just one damn thing after another. Stories don't just report what happened; they invite us to feel something about what happened. (For more on the connection between counting, stories and feelings, click here)

May this Passover be an opportunity to inject renewed meaning into the stories we tell about who we are, whence we came, and where we are going.

Dispensability and Doubt in Leadership

In Chapter 4 of the Book of Esther, Mordecai presents Esther with a dangerous mission: To approach King Ahasuerus uninvited and ask that he annul the decree to annihilate the Jews. Like many acts of leadership, this mission requires Esther to exceed her formal authority and to take on considerable personal risk. As Esther points out to Mordecai, the punishment for entering the King’s inner court uninvited was death.

Given what is at stake for Esther, Mordecai’s words to her (Esther, 4:13-14) seem rather harsh:

Do not imagine that you can escape in the king's house [the fate] of all the Jews. For if you are silent at this time, then relief and deliverance will arise to the Jews from another place; and you and your father's house will perish; and who knows whether it was for this moment that you rose to royalty.

Mordecai’s words carry at least two important messages about leadership. First, every leader is replaceable. If those with the capacity to lead do not rise to the occasion, then others will arise to take their place. As the saying, often attributed to Charles deGaulle, has it: The graveyards are filled with indispensable men.

Second, leadership is inherently improvisational and uncertain. Mordecai’s call to Esther is full of moral certainty. And yet, even as he insists that Esther risk her own life on behalf of her people, Mordecai acknowledges that neither he nor Esther can be certain of the outcome. He does not say to Esther: “It is for this moment that you rose to royalty!”  He says, “Who knows whether it is for this moment that you rose to royalty?” This note of doubt – the substitution of an exclamation mark with a question mark – expresses a deep truth about leadership.

As Heifetz and Linsky note:

Leadership is an improvisational art. You may be guided by an overarching vision, clear values, and a strategic plan, but what you actually do from moment to moment cannot be scripted. You must respond as events unfold. To use our metaphor, you have to move back and forth from the balcony to the dance floor, over and over again throughout the days, weeks, months, and years. While today’s plan may make sense now, tomorrow you’ll discover the unanticipated effects of today’s actions and have to adjust accordingly. Sustaining good leadership, then, requires first and foremost the capacity to see what is happening to you and your initiative as it is happening and to understand how today’s turns in the road will affect tomorrow’s plans.

What is the Right Path?

In every profession, questions arise regarding professional ethics. It’s worth taking a moment to consider when they do so.

Ethical dilemmas arise when value systems clash. They are not a choice between good and bad, but between two different goods. For a person committed only to one system of values, there is no clash, and thus no ethical dilemma. Such people might have pragmatic questions—legal questions, or questions of book-keeping or of public relations. They might even have questions about how to appear committed to a system to which they are not really committed, or of how to adapt to the demands of such a system. But these are not questions of ethics.

Jews who lived in Christian Europe prior to modernity had no ethical dilemma, for example, about charging their gentile neighbors interest or about avoiding the military draft. These actions were permissible by halakha (Jewish law). The only question that concerned the rabbis at that time was whether there might be pragmatic reasons not to do them, such as to avoiding tensions with their gentile neighbors or with the authorities.

With characteristic pithiness, Rabbi Judah the Prince conveys all of this in a single question in Ethics of our Fathers (2:1): “What is the right path that a man should choose?” Rabbi Judah's question presumes that there is more than one path. The question he asks is: How shall we choose the straightest among them?

Unlike the American poet Robert Frost, in his poem “The Road Not Taken,” and unlike many Jews in the modern age, the Haredi leaders who participate in the programs of the Mandel Leadership Institute do not automatically choose the new path just because it is new. At the same time, and unlike Haredi leaders in other places and at other times, they do not automatically choose the old and familiar path just because it is old and familiar. Instead, they pause at the crossroads, and ask themselves: What is the right path?

Take note: They do not ask what is the easiest path, or the most attractive path, or the safest path, or the most accepted path. They ask: What is the right path—even if it be more difficult or more dangerous.

The Mandel Leadership Institute has taken on the task of helping such leaders, for the sake of Haredi society and for the sake of Israeli society as a whole. This is not an easy task, either for the participants or for us, the Institute’s faculty. Each of us is faced with numerous ethical questions , as leaders and educators—about togetherness and apartness; about gender equality; about the boundaries between public and private space; about holy and secular.

It would easier for both sides to abandon this joint venture; this encounter between different worldviews and values systems. But that is not our path. Our path is the joint path; the more challenging path.

May this path bring, in the words of Rabbi Judah the Prince, “honor to those who take it.”

Taken from Dr. Eli Gottlieb’s address at the Mandel Platform event, “What is the Straight Path? Professional Ethics, Morality, Community, and Halakha in the World of Haredi Leaders,” January 2016.