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Greenberg Interiors The Wexner Heritage Foundation L EADERSHIP L IBRARY NOVEMBER 1999 VOLUME II NUMBER 1 CHESHVAN/ KISLEV 5760 EDITOR’S NOTE In this interview, Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg shares his views of leadership with our readers. As one of the most creative thinkers in the Jewish community who concretizes his ideas he is in an excellent position to evaluate outstanding leaders of this generation in North America and in Israel. At the same time, he coura- geously evaluates his own successes and failures as a Jewish communal leader. Rabbi Kerry “Shia” Olitzky Series Editor, Leadership Library THE WEXNER HERITAGE FOUNDATION was founded in 1985 by Leslie Wexner, founder and chairman of The Limited, Inc. and Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman, who now serves as Founding President Emeritus. Together with his wife Abigail, Mr. Wexner seeks to educate Jewish communal leaders in history, thought, traditions and contemporary challenges of the Jewish people. Through its program, the foundation seeks to expand the leadership vision of its members, deepen their Jewish values, and bring a Jewish lan- guage of discourse to their policy and decision-making in the community. The foundation also enables its mem- bers to serve their communities with an enhanced sense of Jewish authenticity, confidence and effectiveness. This motivates members to undertake ever greater re- sponsibilities in community leadership. This Leadership Library series provides members with a rich array of re- sources to assist in the responsibility of community lead- ership. O N L EADERS AND L EADERSHIP SHALOM FREEDMAN (Q). Rabbi, I wanted to ask you about leadership. Of course, the Jewish people has had many great leaders. I think of Moses and Aaron: Moses, with his great strength and the great demands he makes upon the people in service of God. And Aaron, who loves peace, and is more loved by the people, perhaps, because he is too lenient with them. Do you have a concept, Rabbi, of how a Jewish leader should act today? RABBI IRVING GREENBERG. Leadership is an internal quality. Leadership is not a totally separate quality, nor are leaders separate from ordinary people. In that sense, all humans can be leaders. Certain people become lead- ers when they take certain personal qualities (which all people possess) and raise them to a higher level; then they move ahead and serve as a model (or avant-garde, if you will) for the rest of the people. Let me draw an analogy; the definition of the gibor (hero) in Pirke Avot. “Who is strong? The one who self- controls.” The definition plays off a paradox. The strength described is not obvious physical force and power. Rather, the Mishnah takes a particular quality that all humans have—self-restraint—and says that the person who practices it at a more intense level—who attains self-control—is a hero. Similarly, the intensity LEADERSHIP factor enables the individual to serve as a focal point or LIBRARY leader for others. Which are the qualities whose intensification makes a person into a leader? First, I would list vision—the abil- ity to see the big picture. The leader focuses on the main purpose, whereas others concentrate on the details or specific tasks, and often lose sight of the overall goals. The quality of vision includes looking ahead to see the final outcome or the long-range consequences and let- ting them influence action. By contrast, the average per- son—perhaps out of a desire for instant gratification—is concerned with the immediate behavior. An associated leadership quality is responsibility. A leader shows a willingness to deal with a critical situa- tion when others are reluctant to deal with it because they think it will be difficult or costly to act. Most peo- ple want to do the right thing, but the immediacy of the difficulties or other pressing needs diverts them. When an individual stands up and takes the long-term view, or pushes for the right policy despite the cost, the others recognize that their best side is represented in this per- son. Then they accept and support him or her as their leader. Of course, sometimes people lose out in this de- cision or are threatened by the process, so they do not accept the leader. This rejection is one of the risks of leadership. (This last observation implies another qual- ity of leadership: willingness to take risks out of a sense of responsibility and obligation.) The rejection factor also underscores a second dimen- sion of leadership: the relationship of the leader and the community. The leader may be blessed with an extraor- dinary capacity for vision or risk-taking. But if the com- munity simply is not interested and unwilling to move in 2 that direction, then the leader will have no following, and so will not be a leader. Many a would-be leader has taken ON LEADERS up the task and found that the community is so conflicted AND LEADERSHIP or so unconnected that the effort fails. The reverse also happens. Sometimes the community is so eager to go that it pushes forward a reluctant or limited person and makes that individual the leader— really, the vehicle of the community’s will—willy-nilly. In the case of the Jews, leadership grows out of the function of the Jewish people. The people Israel is the avant-garde of humanity. In turn, Jewish leaders are people who serve as models, teachers, and co-workers at a higher intensity level for their fellow Jews. The qual- ity of vision is particularly needed, for the leader must remind people of the covenantal task that, after all, is di- rected over generations and centuries. Since there has always been a gap between current reality and the mes- sianic end goal, it is critical that decisions reflect some thrust toward narrowing the distance. Therefore, the dream must in some way guide the daily decisions. There is a constant need for someone to mediate the gap; the leader must remind people that the effort is needed and assert that the results will make the effort worth- while. Ultimately, the leader is defined as being someone who, either by example, by taking responsibility, or by helping the community deal with a crisis, opportunity, or challenge, has made a difference in the outcome. The specific covenantal tasks of Jews are different today because the situation of the Jewish people is dif- ferent today. In our time, the challenge is how to use power rather than how to survive powerlessness. But the covenantal mission is the same as it always has been— the Jews are supposed to teach, model, and work on the road to tikkun olam. Today’s leader is one who makes it possible to meet the challenges imposed by this mission. Q. Who is meeting those challenges today? 3 GREENBERG. It is not one person alone. Since the mission is tikkun olam, the entire people must participate. And more than one group is helping Jewry meet the chal- lenges to its existence. Incidentally, this is a self-correct- ing process. The Jews have faced dynamic, often LEADERSHIP rapidly changing situations. If there had been no lead- LIBRARY ers, and if they did not meet the challenge, then the Jews would have disappeared. Similarly, when the task is fulfilled, this brings changes in every aspect of life. Every solution brings a change in circumstances. This may well lead to the emergence of new leadership. In biblical times, the great covenantal challenge was how to create a just society, how to create a people and a state able to live and survive by covenantal values. In that era, the great tension was: Will the Jews—in order to survive—lose their way? Will they abandon all moral restraint in fighting their enemies? If that happened, they would have betrayed their mission. On the other hand, if the Israelites had taken the Torah’s covenant values to an extreme and turned ethical directives into an inability to cope with aggression, then they would have been destroyed. They would have failed their mis- sion that way. In biblical times, there was this constant tension. The kings felt that they had to defend the kingdom of Israel- Judah, or, sometimes, had simply to establish their au- thority. They often found the covenantal moral restrictions bothersome and irritating; therefore, they tried to cut corners. Side-by-side with the political lead- ership emerged a prophetic leadership. The prophets challenged the kings to live up to the standards of the covenant. They insisted that ethical behavior and covenant responsibility would protect the Jewish peo- ple (in part, because it would evoke Divine protection for Israel). They insisted that selling out—in the form of social exploitation or playing power politics in foreign affairs—would get in the way of survival. There was a constant dialectical tension between these two kinds of 4 leadership. Another quality was important to leadership in bibli- ON LEADERS cal times: access to God on an ongoing basis. This was AND LEADERSHIP needed for the sake of forgiveness from sins—individual and national—as well as for the sake of blessing and Divine protection and guidance. Sometimes this mediat- ing function was filled by priests; sometimes by prophets. Historically, there was a tendency for priests and the kings to coalesce, but this did not necessarily happen. There was a potential tension between them as well. Over the course of Jewish history, only rarely has one type of leadership been able to solve all the prob- lems. Different types of leaders played different roles at different times. This was particularly true because as time went on and circumstances changed, various types of leadership evolved.
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