The Adaptive Challenge
Many of the events in Numbers seem to have a déjà vu quality about them. We have met them already in Exodus. In both books, the people complain about the water and the food. In both they are guilty of false nostalgia, and in both they express regret at ever having left Egypt. Yet there is a striking and thoroughly perplexing difference between Moses’ responses in the two books.
In Exodus, Moses speaks to God, God tells him what to do, and he does it. In Numbers, by contrast, Moses seems to suffer from strong, almost despairing emotion, as if he is exhausted by the ingratitude and fractiousness of the people and the constant strain of striving to keep the peace between them and God. This parasha contains the most extreme and unnerving example.
This is what the people say: “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost – also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic. But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!” (Num. 11:5).
Moses had faced a very similar complaint before. In Exodus, the people had said: “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death” (Ex. 16:3). On that occasion God told Moses to tell the people that He would rain down for them “bread from heaven” (Ex. 16:4), and so it happened. On this occasion, however, Moses reacts in such a way that we can only call it a breakdown. It is the lowest emotional ebb of his entire career as a leader. These are his words to God:
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?… I cannot carry all these people by myself; the burden is too heavy for me. If this is how You are going to treat me, please go ahead and kill me – if I have found favour in Your eyes – and let me not see my own ruin. (Num. 11:11–15)
This is undeniably strange. Usually, when leaders face repeated challenges, they grow stronger each time. They learn how to respond and how to cope. They develop resilience, a thick skin. They formulate survival strategies. Why then does Moses seem to do the opposite, not only here but often throughout the book of Numbers?
In the chapters that follow, Moses seems to lack the unshakable determination he had in Exodus. At times, as in the episode of the spies (Num. 13–14), or later, in the episode of Zimri (Num. 25:1–15), he seems surprisingly passive, leaving it to others to fight the battle. At other times, as when he brought water from the rock (Num. 20:1–13), he seems to lose control and becomes angry, something a leader should not do. Something has changed, but what? Why the breakdown, the burnout, and the despair?
A fascinating insight is provided by the innovative work of Prof. Ronald Heifetz, co-founder and director of the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.1Ronald Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2002); Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009).
Heifetz makes a fundamental distinction between technical challenges and adaptive challenges. A technical challenge is one where you have a problem and someone else has the solution. You are ill, you go to the doctor, he or she diagnoses your condition and prescribes a pill. All you have to do is follow the instructions.
Adaptive challenges are different. They arise when we are part of the problem. You are ill, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you: I can give you a pill, but the truth is that you are going to have to change your lifestyle. You are overweight, out of shape, you sleep too little and are exposed to too much stress. Pills will not help you until you change the way you live.
Adaptive leadership is called for when the world is changing, when circumstances are no longer what they were, when what once worked works no more. There is no quick fix, no pill, no simple following of instructions. We have to change. The leader cannot do it for us.
The fundamental difference between the books of Exodus and Numbers is that in Exodus, Moses is called on to exercise technical leadership. The Israelites had problems and it was his task to ask God to provide the solutions. The Israelites were enslaved, so God sent signs and wonders, ten plagues, and the Israelites went free. They needed to escape from Pharaoh’s chariots; God told Moses to lift his staff and divide the sea. The people were hungry, so God sent manna from heaven. They were thirsty, so God sent water from a rock. When they had a problem, the leader, Moses, together with God, provided the solution. The people did not have to exert themselves at all.
In the book of Numbers, however, the task was quite different. The Israelites had completed the first part of their journey. They had left Egypt, reached Sinai, and made a covenant with God. Now they were on their way to the Promised Land. What Moses now had to do was to help the people transform themselves from liberated slaves to people willing to undertake the responsibilities of freedom. Instead of providing technical leadership, he had to provide adaptive leadership. He had to get the people to change, to face challenges, to develop courage and stamina, to be able to cope with the privations of the wilderness, to learn to do things for themselves while trusting in God, instead of relying on God to do things for them.
It is precisely because Moses understood this that he was so devastated when he saw that the people had not changed at all. They were still complaining about the food, almost exactly as they had before the revelation at Mount Sinai, before their covenant with God, before they themselves had built the Sanctuary, their first creative endeavour together. In a sense they had become even worse. In Exodus they had complained about the total lack of food. The unleavened bread they had brought with them from Egypt had been consumed and they had nothing to eat at all. In Numbers they had the manna from heaven. They were simply complaining that it was boring. This was not just a failure to grow. It was regressive behaviour.
Moses had to teach the people to adapt, but he sensed – rightly, as it transpires – that this was beyond them. Their strength had become atrophied by years of slavery. They were psychologically passive, dependent. They had lost the capacity for self-motivated action. As we eventually discover, it would take a new generation, born in freedom, to develop the strengths needed for self-governance, the precondition of freedom.
Adaptive leadership is intensely difficult. People resist change. They erect barriers against it. One is denial. A second is anger. A third is blame. That is why adaptive leadership is emotionally draining in the extreme. Many of the great adaptive leaders – among them Lincoln, Gandhi, John F. and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Anwar Sadat, and Yitzhak Rabin – were assassinated. Their greatness was posthumous. Only in retrospect were they seen by their own people as heroes. At the time, they were seen by many as a threat to the status quo, to all that is comfortingly familiar.
Moses, with the insight of the greatest of the prophets, intuitively saw all this. Hence his despair and wish to die. It is far easier to be a technical leader than an adaptive one. It is easy to leave it to God, hard to realise that God is calling us to responsibility, to become His partners in the work of redemption.
Of course, the Torah does not leave it there. In Judaism, despair never has the last word. God comforts Moses, tells him to recruit seventy elders to share the burden of leadership with him, and gives him the strength to carry on. Adaptive leadership is, for Judaism, the highest form of leadership. That is what the prophets did. Without relieving people of their responsibility, they gave them a vision and a hope. They spoke difficult, challenging truths, and they did so with a passion that still has the power to inspire the better angels of our nature.
With devastating honesty – never more so than in its account of Moses’ temporary breakdown – the Torah tells us that adaptive leadership is not easy, and that those who exercise it will face anger and criticism. They may come to feel that they have failed. But they have not. Moses remains the greatest leader the Jewish people has ever known, the man who almost single-handedly shaped the Israelites into a nation that never gave up or gave way to despair.
The difficulty of adaptive leadership is powerfully hinted at in God’s words to Moses’ successor, Joshua: “Be strong and courageous, for you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their ancestors to give them. Only be strong and very courageous to keep and obey all the law My servant Moses gave you” (Josh. 1:6–7).
The first sentence speaks about military leadership. Joshua was to lead the people in their conquest of the land. The second verse speaks about spiritual leadership. Joshua was to ensure that he and the people kept faith with the covenant they had made with God. The first, says the verse, demands courage, but the second demands exceptional courage.
Change always does. To fight an enemy is hard, to fight with yourself harder still. To help people find the strength to change – that is the greatest leadership challenge of all.