Is a Leader a Nursing Father?
In the previous essay, we looked at Moses’ emotional collapse after the people complained about the food. I suggested that the difference between Moses’ reaction in Numbers and in Exodus had to do with the distinction between technical and adaptive leadership challenges. A technical challenge is one where the people have a problem and the leader provides the solution. An adaptive one is where the people themselves are part of the problem and the solution requires that the people change.1Essential here are the writings of Ronald Heifetz, cited in the previous essay.
People resist change, especially when it involves jettisoning habits of the past. It can feel like a loss, almost a bereavement, and they can react with a mixture of resistance, denial, anger, sadness, and nostalgia – a desire to be back where they once were. These things are emotionally draining, especially for the leader, and they are all documented with great accuracy in the various crises described in Numbers.
In this and the following essay I want to stay with this episode of Moses’ breakdown, because it is so powerful, emotive, and challenging. For a moment, the greatest of all Jewish heroes of faith loses faith – not, to be sure, in God, but in himself and his role. In this essay I ask a single, simple question: Was Moses himself part of the problem?
The question is prompted by – and an answer intimated in – Moses’ own words at the beginning of the outburst that ended with him asking God to “please go ahead and kill me” (Num. 11:15). This is how he begins:
Why have You brought this trouble on Your servant? What have I done to displease You that You put the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do You tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant, to the land You promised on oath to their ancestors? (Num. 11:11–12)
Inevitably, when we read Moses’ anguished plea, our attention focuses on his wish to die. But this is not the most interesting part of his speech. Moses was not the only Jewish leader to pray to die. So did Elijah. So did Jeremiah. So did Jonah.2See, on Elijah, I Kings 19:3–4; on Jeremiah, Jer. 20:7–18; on Jonah, Jonah 4:1–3.
Spiritual leadership is difficult. Unlike politicians, prophets tell the people what they least want to hear. This is one of the most stressful tasks anyone can undertake. Jeremiah is eloquent on the subject: “I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me…. The word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long” (Jer. 20:7–8). Moses was not the only prophet to find his mission almost unbearable.
What is singular here is his statement that God had told him to carry the people in his arms “as a nurse carries an infant.” But God had never used those words or even remotely implied such a thing. He had asked Moses to lead but did not tell him how to lead. He told Moses what to do, but never discussed with him his leadership style.
It seems that the Torah is here hinting that the way Moses conceived the role of leader was itself part of the problem. “Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do You tell me to carry them in my arms?” This is the language of the leader-as-parent, the “great man” theory of leadership.
Sigmund Freud was deeply absorbed by this issue. He argued that crowds become dangerous when a certain kind of leader comes to power.3See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York: Norton, 1952) and Moses and Monotheism, part III (New York: Vintage, 1967). See also Mark Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), who argues that this is why Freud spent the last year of his life writing the third part of Moses and Monotheism, as a warning of the danger of the craving for strong leadership.
Such a leader, often highly charismatic, resolves the tensions within the group by seeming to promise solutions to all their problems. He is strong. He is persuasive. He is clear. He offers a simple analysis of why the people are suffering. He identifies enemies, focuses energies, and makes the people feel whole, complete, part of something great. “Leave it to me,” he seems to say. “All you have to do is follow and obey.”
Moses was not a typical charismatic leader. He said of himself, “I am not a man of words” (Ex. 4:10). He was not particularly close to the people. Aaron was. Perhaps Miriam was also. Caleb had the power to calm the people, at least temporarily. Moses had neither the gift nor the desire to sway crowds, resolve complexity, attract a mass following, or win popularity. That was not the kind of leader the Israelites needed, which is why God chose Moses, an awkward, angular man but one with a strong sense of justice and a passion for liberty.
But Moses, especially here, seems to have felt that the leader must do it all. He must be the people’s father, mother, and nursemaid. He must be the doer, the problem-solver, omniscient and omnipotent. If something needs to be done it is for the leader to do it.4Note that Joseph, in Genesis, is this kind of leader. That is how he is described in three different roles, as head servant in Potiphar’s house, as chief assistant to the warden in prison, and as viceroy of Egypt (Gen. 39, 41). It is highly significant that this kind of leadership is portrayed as effective in an Egyptian context but not in an Israelite one.
He says, for example, “Where can I get meat for all these people? They keep wailing to me, ‘Give us meat to eat!’” (Num. 11:13). But this was either God’s problem or the people’s. It was not Moses’.
The trouble is that if the leader is a parent, then the followers remain children. They are totally dependent on him. They do not develop skills of their own. They do not acquire a sense of responsibility or the self-confidence that comes from exercising it. It was this dependency that led to the sin of the Golden Calf (Ex. 32). Moses had been absent up the mountain for a long time and the people did not know what had happened to him. They panicked and made a Golden Calf. This is one of the reasons why God told Moses to gather a team of seventy elders to share the burden with him. He was saying: Do not even try to do it all yourself.
The “great man” theory of leadership haunts Jewish history like a recurring nightmare. In the days of Samuel, the people believed their problems would be solved if they appointed a king “like all the other nations” (I Sam. 8:5). In vain, Samuel warned them that this would only make their problems worse. Saul, their first king, looked the part, handsome, upright, “a head taller than anyone else” (I Sam. 9:2), but he lacked strength of character. David, their second, committed adultery. Solomon, their third, blessed with wisdom, was seduced by his wives into folly. The kingdom split. Only a few subsequent kings were equal to the moral and spiritual challenge of combining faith in God with a politics of realism and civic virtue.
During the Second Temple period, the success of the Maccabees was dramatic but short-lived. The Hasmonean kings themselves became Hellenised. The office of high priest became politicised. No one could contain the growing rifts within the nation. Having defeated the Greeks, the nation fell to the Romans. Sixty years later, R. Akiva identified Bar Kokhba as another “great man” in the mould of Judah the Maccabee,5He believed that he was the Messiah. See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 11:3. and the result was the worst tragedy in Jewish history until the Holocaust.
Judaism is about diffused responsibility, making each individual count, building a cohesive nation on the basis of a shared vision, educating people to their full potential, and valuing honest argument and the dignity of dissent. That is the kind of culture the rabbis inculcated during the centuries of dispersion. It is how the pioneers built the land and State of Israel in modern times. It is the vision Moses articulated in the last month of his life in the book of Deuteronomy.
It is precisely this kind of leadership that was needed for the adaptive challenge that lay ahead. It took a strong leader – Moses – to lead the people out of slavery. But it took a quite different kind of figure –
Joshua – to allow the people to develop their own strengths. The rabbis said that “the face of Moses was like the sun; the face of Joshua was like the moon” (Bava Batra 75a). This is precisely what made Joshua the right leader for the new generation. The sun dazzles almost blindingly, but moonlight allows even the flame of a candle to burn brightly. Joshua left space for the people to fill and thereby grow.
Perhaps this was what God was hinting to Moses when He told him to take seventy elders to stand with him in the Tent of Meeting, and “I will come down and speak with you there, and I will take some of the spirit that is on you and put it on them” (Num. 11:16–17). He was telling Moses that his task was not to solve the crisis of the people’s demand for meat. His task was to inspire others with his spirit – delegating, empowering, guiding, and encouraging. God was telling Moses that great leaders do not create followers; they create leaders. They share their inspiration. They give of their spirit to others. They do not see the people they lead as children who need a father-mother-nursemaid, but as adults who need to be educated to take individual and collective responsibility for their own future.
People become what their leader gives them the space to become. When that space is large, they grow into greatness.