By Emily Dana
I’m going to be honest: I am not usually one for sports metaphors. As I say colloquially, “I don’t sport.” This being said, Rabbi Cohen’s program on Leadership: Different Styles, Goals, and People did get me thinking about what leadership means to me. This thought led to many more questions than answers.
Is a good leader someone who is decisive? Someone who is the one who says, “yes, let’s get pizza instead of falafel today”? Someone who puts themselves in charge of making the decisions for whatever group that they’re a part of?
Is a good leader someone who listens? Someone who takes in all of the opinions of the group, and figures out how to best move towards the goal of the group? Can one be a good leader by stepping back in some situations or does a good leader always have to be the one to step forward? Does stepping back call one’s leadership into question? In other words, can a good leader ever be a follower? Does a leader always have to be learning or are they ever “good enough”?
Is a good leader one who stands up for others when their voices are being silenced? One who takes the values that they hold close to them and uses those values to choose what to fight for?
Does a good leader have to know exactly what they believe? Or can a good leader struggle with their beliefs some of the time?
Is a good leader one who is authentically and unapologetically themselves? Is there such thing as one being “too authentic”? Or is there no such thing?
Is a good leader always the one in front of the group or can one lead from behind the scenes? Certainly in any play, the stage manager leads from behind the curtain, but that stage manager is no less important than the director or the actors.
All of these questions (and more) got me thinking about good leaders that I could think of either from my own life or from books or from the Torah. We talk a lot about Nachshon, the first man to step into the Red Sea before it parted, a lot on the Nachshon Project. But then I asked, “Do we all have to be Nachshon? How many Nachshons (Nachshonim?) can the world really handle? What if I want to be someone who leads from within the group instead of being the one to step out in front of it?”
I also thought about all of the amazing camp counselors and unit heads that I have had over the years. What did they do or what qualities did they have that made them such great leaders? Sure, they were kind and patient, but there’s a lot of kind and patient people in the world who don’t become great leaders. What is that extra spark that they had?
Now, I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, and many of them just led to a crisis in my brain about what kind of leader I am and what kind of leader I want to be. These questions are important to ask. How can we try to encompass all of these values and be sane and take care of ourselves at the same time? How can we overcome our fears and move forward as leaders?
But then I thought of Moses who is arguably the most important leader that our people have ever had. Moses stepped forward to fight for the Jewish people even when he didn’t really want to. Moses believed in his people and his God through many years of hardship. God helped him out in some of the hard times. And Moses wasn’t perfect either. He didn’t get to enter the land that he spent most of his life leading his people to because of one mistake he made. And that’s the kind of leader I think I can be. One who tries my absolute best, but still makes mistakes. One who cares so much about the people I am leading. And one who has faith that when human leadership fails, God will be there to do the rest.
