So after seeing announcements that from now on bus drivers are to be called “road leaders,” parents “family leaders,” and rabbis “community leaders,” I understood that the “leadership” epidemic that has swept over us in recent years is conquering its final frontiers. Apparently simple values, like being just a good parent, a devoted teacher, or a reliable driver, are no longer enough unless you attach the leadership slogan to them. We all have to be leaders. Anything less doesn’t count.
When I was a child, my parents sent me to a nature club and an astronomy club. I loved going to those classes, and to this day these subjects are dear to my heart. Today, when I want to send my own children to after-school activities, I struggle to find simple clubs like those. If my daughter wants to join a nature club, she will have to choose the “KKL Young Leadership Empowerment Project,” and if she wants to study astronomy she can enroll in the “Scientific Leadership Program.” These are two small examples of the epidemic of leadership programs that has swept over us in recent years.
A quick browse through Google will turn up hundreds of strange and varied kinds of “leadership groups” — from leadership schools and leadership academies to leadership sports teams and leadership ceramics classes, leadership rope parks, leadership coaches, leadership nature clubs and many more.
People talk a great deal against reality-TV culture, in which everyone wants to be a star, yet there is no meaningful difference between that culture and the culture that educates us all to be leaders. The message of both is similar: either you are famous and great and heroic and in charge, or your life has no meaning. Simpler values like social involvement, science education, family and love of humanity no longer stand on their own unless the word leadership, in one of its many inflections, is stapled to them. We have reached the point where more people have been through “leadership programs” than there are poor ordinary folk left to be led.
Is it a coincidence that precisely in an era of severe leadership crisis, we never stop pumping out the message that everyone is a leader?
If we are all leaders, then no one is a leader.
I once took part in one of those conferences where the youth are pumped full of the message that they will lead. I asked the conference moderator, one of the foremost heralds of the “leadership” gospel in Israel, whether he truly believes leadership is a value we should educate toward. I pointed out that, to my meager historical knowledge, few good leaders have emerged from leadership schools. Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, Rabin and Begin did not attend a leadership school. Most of the good leaders throughout history came from the people, from the ground, with a light in their eyes and a desire to make things better. He replied that being a leader means, first of all, leading yourself in every walk of life — that you have the choice to decide, to do, to act, to shape your life and shape your surroundings; in short, to lead yourself. Fine, nice. But filing all that under the word “leadership” is a sleight of hand, word-laundering. When you tell an ordinary person he is a “leader,” he understands it as leading others. You place before his eyes, as a banner headline and a supreme value, the idea that he — he must find herd-like followers to walk behind him (where to?), because he is a leader.
Let us look for a moment at the great leaders of the Tanakh: Moses, perhaps the greatest leader of all, refuses the leadership mission imposed on him no fewer than four times (!) and pleads with God — “Please, send someone else” — that is, lay the mission on somebody else (Exodus 4:13). Gideon the judge, who led the people to one of its greatest victories in the battle in the Jezreel Valley, refuses leadership and says, “Behold, my clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the youngest in my father’s house” (Judges 6:15). At the end of his days, when he is invited to become Israel’s first king, he politely turns down the offer: “I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you!” Next, King Saul. When the prophet hints at his future kingship, Saul is embarrassed and replies, “I am from the smallest of the tribes of Israel.” When they come to crown him, he is found “hiding among the baggage,” and after his coronation Saul goes back home to plow his field as if nothing had happened (1 Samuel 10).
By contrast, there are dozens of examples of biblical kings who were convinced they were born “leaders.” Abimelech, Absalom, Adonijah and Elah son of Baasha are just a few examples of men who saw themselves as leaders from the womb, for whom the craving for leadership and power stood above all else. The stories of these kings usually ended in detached, arrogant rule — the kind that, in every case we mentioned, led to civil war. Jotham’s parable, told of Abimelech son of Gideon, captures this reality precisely: the good trees refused to reign, while the bramble — long on ambition and short on ability — crowned itself by force and burned down all the trees of the forest with it.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from the figure of the leader in the Tanakh, it is utterly simple:
“Whoever wants to be a leader — we do not want him as a leader.”
The great Greek philosopher Plato takes the same view. In his “Politeia,” from The Republic, he paints a picture of how the utopian state would be run:
“And therefore, I said, the good are not willing to rule either for money or for honor… In their case, then, compulsion and punishment are required, and this is probably why it is held disgraceful for a man to seek office of his own accord without waiting to be compelled… For it seems that if a city of good men ever came to be, its citizens would compete to avoid ruling just as men now compete to rule; and then it would become plain that the true ruler does not, in very truth, pursue his own advantage but that of those under his authority — and anyone who understood this would choose to receive benefit from another rather than go to the trouble of benefiting others.”
Put simply: a leader who wants to lead will inevitably put his own good first; a leader who grew from below, whom a complex reality carried into leadership, will naturally be the emissary of the people from whom he grew.
So what should we educate for?
Terribly simple — educate for values.
Which values we should educate toward is open to debate. But one thing is certain: leadership is not a value. It is merely a tool for realizing values, and so there is no point whatsoever in making it the headline.
During my military service I worked with many excellent officers, but also with quite a few bad ones. What the bad ones had in common, strange as it may sound, was that they wanted to be officers. An officer, or any leader, who got where he is because he wants to advance certain values will in most cases be a good officer; but when I talk with teenagers who tell me “I want to be an officer so I can lead people,” that is a very bad answer. Lead them where? For what? Just so that you can be the one in front? Education for “leadership” turns the whole thing on its head — first you look for someone to lead, and only afterwards do you go looking for values that will serve your leadership.
Instead of educating for leadership, let us educate for a sense of mission and responsibility for those around us. To take responsibility for your life and the lives of the people around you, to take responsibility for the values you believe in and to know how to live them even when it is hard, even when society stifles or belittles you. The biblical leaders we mentioned proved their leadership not through speeches and declarations, but by taking responsibility and being the person in the place where there was no one else. So it was with Moses saving the beaten Hebrew; with Saul marching out resolutely to the aid of the people of Jabesh-Gilead groaning under the king of Ammon; and with Gideon, who saw himself responsible for the fate of the inhabitants of the Jezreel Valley and rallied the people to save them from the hand of the Midianite raiders.
So who will lead us?
When we educate on the values we believe in out of deep inner identification, with a light in our eyes, and above all while living those values ourselves, the leaders will emerge on their own:
Out of 1,000 believers in equal rights came one Martin Luther King.
Out of 1,000 believers in the importance of exploring the universe came one Stephen Hawking
Out of 1,000 believers in the importance of protecting nature came one Azaria Alon
Out of 1,000 believers in the importance of a state for the Jewish people, one Herzl will arise.
The good leader is the one in whom the value burned most fiercely, until he could no longer keep silent. He is the one who decided to follow the value he believed in all the way, and who knew, at the right crossroads and at the right moment, to take responsibility and be the person in the place where no one else stood.
The bottom line: stop educating your students to be leaders. Go back to the simple values you believe in. Tell them how important it is not to stand idly by when they see those values being trampled, how important it is to take responsibility and carry their values into the world of action rather than leave them in endless talk — and above all, how to live out those values without creating new social injustices along the way. That way, perhaps, we stand a chance of ultimately raising worthy leaders who grow out of a world of values, rather than leaders who first want to lead and only then pick a value in whose name to rise to greatness.
I will close with the words of one of the most famous teachers in the world — Dumbledore. An exemplary, fictional figure, masterfully crafted by the author J.K. Rowling. The greatest wizard of his generation chose to devote his life to education at the school for wizards. At the end of the seventh book in the Harry Potter series, Harry confronts him with the question of why a wizard as great as he never became “Minister of Magic” (the equivalent of a prime minister in our world), even though the post was offered to him time and again, and even though he could have excelled at it. And this is the wonderful answer J.K. Rowling places in Dumbledore’s mouth:
“I am not sure I could have been a good Minister of Magic. As a very young man I proved that power was my weakness, a temptation I could not withstand. It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, who take up the reins because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear them well. It was safer to leave me at Hogwarts. I think I was a fairly good teacher”
(Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, page 647).
