What Makes a Leader?

On this weekend dedicated to the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., my thoughts turn to the subject of leadership, specifically to a pivotal turning point in King’s career, the fateful evening of January 27, 1956, in Montgomery, Alabama. King was the minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Rosa Parks had refused to change her seat, and the Montgomery bus boycott was underway. Violent threats being leveled against King and his family were increasing in degree and frequency. A few days earlier, King had been given reliable information that plans were afoot to take his life. With his family fast asleep, the phone rang, and an angry voice began to hurl vulgar racial epithets, threatening, “We’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” King hung up the phone, put on a pot of coffee, and head in hands, bowed over the kitchen table and prayed to God.

In his book Stride Toward Freedom, King describes what happened next – a scene made vivid for me when I visited that kitchen table a few years ago. King writes that he was ready to give up. His courage depleted, his family at risk, he contemplated how best to step aside. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone.”

It was at that moment, King writes, that he experienced the presence of the divine as never before. “It seemed,” he recalled, “as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying, ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’”

“Almost at once,” King reflected, “my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything” (Stride Toward Freedom, pp. 134-35).

King’s kitchen table conversion would be tested soon enough. Three days later, a bomb blew up on his front porch with his family escaping by a hairsbreadth. Time and again King’s leadership would be tested. From the bus boycott to sit-ins to voting rights to urban poverty to Vietnam to sanitation workers, and every cause of civil rights in between, he was a reluctant prophet, who – contrary to his initial instinct, and ultimately at the cost of his own life – followed his principles. A ministry, a leadership of courage and conscience which we, this week and every week, honor and pledge to continue.

This morning we begin reading the second book of the Bible, Sh’mot/Exodus, and in it, the story of our people’s liberation from under the thumb of Pharaoh’s oppression. For all the story’s meanings – moral, national, theological, and otherwise – at its core, it is a call narrative, a tale of leadership formation, the making of our people’s greatest leader: Moses. Long before Dr. King, Moses was the paradigm for reluctant leadership – an individual called to action against his will and better judgement. “Mi anokhi, who am I,” Moses asks God at the burning bush, “that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites from Egypt?” Time and again, in this week’s and next week’s Torah reading, Moses deflects, demurs, and declines. “I have a speech impediment. I am not of the people. God, you have the wrong guy, pick someone else. You and the people are in need of a leader. Me – I am afraid.”

Every generation, our own especially and desperately included, needs leadership. It is worth asking what exactly were Moses’s leadership qualifications? What made him worthy of consideration? It may not have been evident to him, but for God, and for those of us who have read the chapter prior to the burning bush, we have evidence of what made him a worthy choice. Three scenes, three interrelated incidents worth exploring – for Moses and for all leaders to this day.

The first scene, our introduction to an adult Moses, is when he goes out and witnesses the oppression of a Hebrew slave, a kinsman being beaten by an Egyptian taskmaster. Having grown up in the comfort of Pharaoh’s house, Moses had every reason to ignore what he was seeing. But the text explains that Moses looked this way and that way and in world of bystanders, chose to be an upstander. Something was triggered inside, not just a sense of empathy, not just a feeling of kinship, but a call to action. Moses stepped up and struck down the Egyptian taskmaster. To see something and to do something is the threshold of entry, the baseline requirement for any leader.

This scene alone may have sufficed to qualify Moses for leadership, but it was only the beginning. The following day Moses happens upon two Israelites fighting one with the other, and here too he intervenes. “Why,” he asks, “do you strike your fellow?” Despite his good intentions, Moses’ mediation is entirely unwelcome.

“Who made you the boss of us?” they ask. “Do you plan to kill us as you killed the Egyptian the other day?” This second incident builds on the first. It is one thing to intervene on behalf of one’s brethren – a muscle group Moses will need and then some when he confronts Pharaoh and all of Egypt. It is another thing altogether to enter the brave space of seeking to make peace between two quarreling kinsmen, a thought to which we will return soon enough.

We know Moses has empathy for his own, we know Moses will step up when he sees two brothers at odds with one another. But it is the third incident that demonstrates the extent of his heroic empathy. On the run in a foreign land, Moses comes across Midianite maidens being harassed by the local shepherds. Va-yakom Moshe, and Moses rose up, not only driving off the gang of shepherds but also watering the maidens’ flock. This is not just another biblical boy-meets-girl-at-the-well story, or at least it is not just that. First, an act of empathy on behalf of his brethren, then an intervention between sparring kin, and now courageous concern for the well-being of complete strangers. It is no wonder that the scene immediately following this one is that of God paying heed to the suffering of the Israelites. It is no wonder that it was Moses whom God would choose as the divine instrument to bring about Israel’s redemption. Reluctant – yes. But even if Moses didn’t know it yet, God knew and the reader knows that he is a man constitutionally incapable of turning away from the suffering of his brethren, a man who is willing to involve himself in the quarrels of his kin and ready to put himself out on behalf of people who are not his own.

These qualities for which Moses was chosen are not particular to him, they are the building blocks for biblical leadership from the very beginning. Why was Abraham chosen, the Rabbis ask? Because unlike those who came before him – Adam, Noah, others – Abraham recognized that the condition of the world was his concern. He was the first to accept the obligation to step up in the face of injustice. In reflecting on Abraham’s call from God, the Midrash provides the image of a man who encounters a palace engulfed in flames. Abraham’s heroism was that he refused to walk away. At great risk to himself, Abraham sought to extinguish the flames consuming this world. “Go forth to a land that I will show you” – yes. “Father a nation as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sands of the earth” – of course. But to be a Jew is a calling that extends beyond parochial self-concern. It is the through line beginning with Abraham, running through Moses and directing us to this day. To see something, to say something, to do something on behalf of a suffering humanity. Given the news out of LA., the image of a house in flames cuts close to the bone, and for me as a Los Angeles native, close to home. Homes, schools, shuls, livelihoods – destroyed. Their suffering is our suffering. Now is the time, as you hopefully saw in the synagogue emails, to do what you can to help provide relief for the short- and long-term needs of Los Angeles.

And responsive as we must be to the sufferings of others, the litmus test for Jewish leadership extends even higher and runs even deeper. In the case of Moses, his greatest leadership moment was not standing before Pharaoh, splitting the sea, or even receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai. The greatest test of Moses’s leadership was when God threatened to destroy Israel in the wake of the Golden Calf, and Moses interceded to stay God’s wrath and argue Israel’s case no matter their misdeeds. So too with Abraham, whose greatest leadership test was neither the wars he fought nor the binding of his son on the altar. Abraham’s greatest leadership moment was when he stepped up and stood up to God in the face of God’s plan to destroy the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. And while Abraham fell short and Moses succeeded, it is the fact and courageous act of stepping into the breach that – as taught by my late teacher Yochanan Muffs – has stood as the true test of biblical leadership.

To say it more simply, the answer to the question of why God chose Moses – or why God chose Abraham, or why God chose anyone – is that God wanted to pick someone who would be willing to stand up even to God. It is easy to live after the world’s opinion. It is easy in solitude to live after one’s own. But the great leader, contrary to what Emerson said, is the one willing to step into the breach between, to step into the fray – as Moses did with the clashing Hebrews, as Moses and Abraham each did at the critical juncture of their careers. Not just the refusal to look away, not just expressions of empathy for the suffering of one’s own people and humanity, but the courage to step bravely into the space that acknowledges the claims and counterclaims of the two sides, all the while working to keep the two sides from tearing each other apart. That is the leadership requirement of this hour and every hour.

We sit this Shabbat in the hours between the signing of a hostage deal and its hoped-for implementation. Emotions are high on all sides and truth be told, there are truths to be told from both sides. Those who believe that the only impediment to this hostage deal is the cynical self-interest of the Prime Minister are, I believe, so engulfed by their hatred of him that they ignore the murderous acts of the criminals who will be imminently released, the horrors of October 7th, and the clear and cruel tactics of Hamas, who would use hostages as pawns for the sake of their own preservation and as a means of psychological and actual warfare. And if you believe that a hostage deal is either immoral or ill-conceived because it will give rise to the future Sinwars or somehow dishonor the lives of the soldiers felled in defense of the country, I would remind you that every single day this war continues is yet another day on which the seeds for future Sinwars are being planted and another day on which the irreplaceable lives of young Israeli soldiers are being lost forever. There are no easy answers here. It is both lazy and irresponsible to act as if there are.

We American Jews are bit players in a drama taking place across the ocean. At best we are akin to Moses trying to resolve a fight between kinsmen. But whatever one’s personal politics may be, it is time for the hostages to come home, it is time for a cease fire, for this forever war to come to an end, a time to think and work towards a day after. It is time to enter into that brave and uncomfortable leadership space that seeks the well-being of our brethren, the well-being of a suffering humanity, and a Marshall plan for Gaza’s physical and political reconstruction. Last Saturday night in Jerusalem, I stood in a crowd of Israelis who at one and the same rally, in one and the same breath, honored the heroism and mourned the lives of IDF soldiers defending Israel, all the while calling for a hostage deal and cease fire. We American Jews need to figure out a way to do the same – because it is the right position to hold and it is the position that will hold us together.

Ours is a charged time. There are chilling forces on all sides seeking to still voices of others. As the line from “Wicked” goes, “If you make it discouraging enough, you can keep anyone silent.” I know the feeling of having one’s courage, clarity, and principles tested. Here in this community, here on this pulpit, we reject the comfortable allure of facile and false binaries in favor of embracing the uncomfortable complexities reality has dealt us. As Dr. King himself wrote, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

Our challenge is to defend our people and to hold empathy for the sufferings of all, innocent Palestinians included. To step up and stand in the breach, to dignify the uncomfortable truths of both sides, to bear the brunt of it all, and persevere through the trials of the hour. In other words, to “stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; [knowing] God will be at your side forever.” That is the model set before us by our tradition; that is the measure of leadership, for you, for me, for anyone; that is the model by which, together, we will stay the course and stay together in this season of reckoning.

King, Jr., Martin Luther. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958.