Rules for Rabbis

On the 541st and, for that matter, final page of Sanford Horwitt’s biography of Saul Alinsky, Horwitt reveals the story that he believes is the defining moment in the life of one of our nation’s most provocative and impactful community organizers. Born to Russian Jewish parents in Chicago in 1909, Saul David Alinsky led many of our country’s most significant movements for social change over the course of his lifetime. From addressing societal ills in Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods to the civil rights movement, from the antiwar movement of the 1960s to mentoring Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, Alinsky was in many respects the founding father of modern community organizing. From his founding of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) to his famous book on community organizing, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky’s institutional and intellectual legacy extends well beyond his untimely death in 1971, shaping generations of community organizers, not the least of whom is President Obama.

Alinsky recalled this childhood story not long before he died:

When he was twelve years old and living on the old West Side [of Chicago], one day a friend was jumped and beaten by three kids from the nearby Polish neighborhood west of Crawford Avenue. “So naturally, we went on the hunt and found a couple of Poles,” Alinsky remembered. “We were merrily beating them up when the police suddenly appeared and arrested all of us.” The boys were taken to the police station, where their mothers soon appeared, screaming as to how the boys had disgraced their families and would be punished when they got home.

But Alinsky’s mother first took her son to their rabbi, and the rabbi lectured him about how wrong he was. Young Sollie defended himself. “‘They beat my friend up,’ I said. ‘So we beat them up. That’s the American way. It’s also in the Old Testament: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Beat the hell out of them. That’s what everybody does.’ The rabbi answered, ‘You think you’re a man because you do what everybody does. Now I want to tell you something that the great Rabbi Hillel said: “Where there are no men, be thou a man.” I want you to remember that.’

“I’ve never forgotten it,” Alinsky said, a lifetime later. (Horwitt, Let Them Call Me Rebel, p. 541)

B’makom she-ein anashim, hishtadel lihiyot ish, “In a place where there are no men, be thou a man.” [Pirkei Avot 2:6] If nothing else, this weekend’s commemoration of Martin Luther King’s legacy reminds us of the ability of a single person to organize a social movement and bring about change: To see the ills, inequalities, and abuses of an unjust society, and choose not to do what everyone else does, neither to be frozen into inertia nor prompted to violence, but to organize and mobilize towards redressing and fixing the fractures of our broken world.

Given the confluence of the weekend’s commemoration and the Torah reading’s dramatic tale of liberation, I want to focus not so much on any one particular social issue, but to draw on the Exodus narrative as a manual for community organizing – to interweave the writing of Alinsky and the Almighty, and offer my own “Rules for Rabbis.” In other words, what lessons can we learn about community organizing from the most famous community organizer of all: Moses himself.

Let’s begin with the qualifications of Moses to be a community organizer. At first blush, the most interesting thing to say about Moses’ leadership qualities is that he seems to have none. It is not his pedigree – he comes from nowhere; it is not his speaking ability, which we know to be deficient; it is not his confidence, which we know to be lacking; it is not in his spine of steel – he kvetches until his final day. It is certainly not his ability to keep cool under fire. From killing the Egyptian to the Golden Calf to striking the rock, Moses demonstrates a repeated proclivity to fly off the handle. So what was Moses’ distinctive leadership quality? In a word: empathy. From the very beginning to the very end, Moses was predisposed to see someone else’s problems and make them his own. Having grown up in Pharaoh’s house, Moses “goes out to see his brethren.” (2:11) More than signaling physical movement, this verse denotes empathy, he sees their burdens, he sees that there is no one taking action, and, as Rabbi Hillel teaches and Alinsky learned, he rises to the occasion. What is rule number one of organizing? Empathy.

Next is the story of the “burning bush,” where God reveals the divine self and speaks to Moses in a way no other human has experienced since. It is a mystical encounter, but on a more basic level, it is a relational meeting, an introductory coffee, or in organizing-speak, a “one-on-one.” As any community organizer will tell you, the secret to any social movement is relationship building. You find out what makes someone tick, you explore that person’s values, find out what is important to him or her. You build a connection, which becomes a trust, which in turn becomes social capital. You learn the stories, commitments, and passions that make someone act, and in that dialogue you build common cause. Communities do not emerge out of email blasts and membership rosters. The binding DNA of any community is found in its relationships. God to Moses, Moses to Aaron, Aaron to the people. One relationship at a time, each important unto itself, and in the hands of a skilled community organizer, the social capital necessary if you want anything to happen.

And, sure enough, the central issue emerges. On the surface, it is to transform a people from slavery to freedom, from Egypt to the land flowing with milk and honey, from serving Pharaoh to serving God. But at its core, the nub of our drama is found in God’s ability to convince Moses, and Moses’ ability to convince Israel, of the most important distinction of all: the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. Over and over and over again, Moses impresses on the people the importance of looking forward and not back. It is, in a sense, the corollary to empathy not only to identify with the plight of another person, but to inspire that person (or people) to the realization that the world in which we live in today need not be the world of tomorrow. This is the prophetic litmus test for any organizer past, present, and future: the ability to articulate a compelling vision of how the world ought to be.

It is here that we get to the heart of this week’s Torah reading: the plague cycle, in which Moses the revolutionary, an organizer and agitator, brings the wrath of God upon the house of Pharaoh. On a fairly obvious level, the plagues follow all of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” Tactically, they shift the terms of the debate: the condition of the Israelites is no longer just Moses’ problem but the problem of all of Egypt. Moses hits the Egyptians hard – the Nile, livestock, the firstborn – at the heart of Pharaoh’s interests. The plagues demonstrate that Moses is a leader who can bring results. Their rhythmic quality, one after the other, keeps the pressure on. Time and again Moses shows not only that he can bring a plague, but that he can also end a plague, a skill that strikes me as equally important. And the power of the plagues is not just their intensity, but their number. We know there are ten plagues; Pharaoh does not. In Alinsky’s words: “Power is not what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Right now Moses is perceived as the man with an endless number of arrows in his quiver. The plagues create an unstable, and in Pharaoh’s mind, unsustainable situation in which the Egyptian people have turned against their leader, a circumstance that we know will soon lead to Pharaoh’s capitulation to the demands on the table.

As is often noted, the intended audience of the plagues was not just Pharaoh and not just the Egyptians, but the children of Israel themselves. This was an extended trust-building exercise with the Israelites. The plagues established God’s relationship to Moses and Moses’ relationship to the people. Strange as it sounds, the plagues were not only to antagonize, but to secure a base, the all-important relationship between God and Moses and Israel.

And because there were not one or three or five, but ten plagues, we learn another critical principle of community organizing: stamina. This is a campaign that does not take place overnight. It is a test of wills, a contest over who will blink first. Perhaps the most elusive element of organizing is the ingredient of staying power – the ability of a person, a committee or a community to identify an ideal, nurture it, develop it, fight for it, in thick and thin over a sustained amount of time. Pharaoh’s heart may have hardened, but eventually Moses broke his will. It was Moses’ stamina and perseverance that would win the day.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, as the plague narrative wraps up in next week’s Torah reading, there is an instructive scene in which Moses attributes the entire drama of the preceding chapters to God. Glossing over his own role, Moses tells the Israelites that when their children ask about the Exodus, they should say that God did it. This humility, we know, is given annual expression in the Passover Seder, where Moses – the architect of the Exodus – is never mentioned. The organizing principle is that the most effective leader is also the one who is able to contract his ego – to do what is called in Hebrew tzimtzum – and to know that the cause is always more important than the credit. Leadership should always be driven by values, issues, and ideals, not by personalities. Rhetoric, reputation, charisma. We need to use every weapon in our personal arsenal to fight for what we believe in, but these are the means, not the ends. We can never let our egos obscure that it is a value, not a personality, which is at stake.

To review, here are a few leadership principles from our Torah reading:

1. Empathy is the beginning of organizing.
2. Community organizing begins with one-on-one relationships.
3. Always reach from the world as it is towards the world as it ought to be.
4. When the time comes, dramatic tactics have their place. Hit them hard, hit them repeatedly, but always make sure your base is secure.
5. Staying power or stamina is what separates great leaders from good ones.
6. Leadership is never about you but about the values that are made evident in the life of the community.

There are, I am sure, many more principles to be learned from our Torah reading. For us as a community what is most important is not that we identify them, but that we infuse our community with them. Ultimately, the record of our community will be a reflection of the degree to which we give life to these themes throughout the year. We dare not let our values and ideals lie lazily on the scriptural page. As Jews, as Zionists, as New Yorkers, as global citizens, we are, without a doubt, living through a moment with historic challenges, threats, and opportunities. Not unlike King, not unlike Alinsky, not unlike Moses himself, we are faced with the question of how we will respond to the pressing issues of the day. We dare not do nothing. In a world where there are no men, may we be the men and the women that we aspire to be. May we organize in the spirit of our predecessors, defend the values we hold dear, and build a future worthy of the love that we have for our children.