Posts Tagged: jonathan sacks
The Sins of Leaders
Leaders make mistakes. That is inevitable. So, strikingly, our parsha implies. The real issue is how he or she responds to those mistakes. The point is...
Celebrating the Victories of Others
If leaders are to bring out the best in those they lead, they must give those people the chance to show they are capable of...
Common Challenges Help People Come Together
How do you remotivate a demoralized people? How do you put the pieces of a broken nation back together again? That was the challenge faced...
How Leaders Fail: Courage to Oppose the Mob
Leaders can fail for two kinds of reasons. The first is external. The time may not be right. The conditions may be unfavourable. There may...
Judaism is a Religion of Merit, Not Monarchies
One of the most important Jewish contributions to our understanding of leadership is its early insistence of what, in the eighteenth century, Montesquieu called "the...
Judaism is About Taking Personal Responsibility
The sequence of parshiyot, Terumah, Tetzaveh, Ki Tissa, Vayakhel and Pekudei, is puzzling in many ways. First, it outlines the construction of the Tabernacle, the portable house...
Jewish Law Provides Vision and Detail
Our parsha (Bible portion) takes us through a bewildering transition. Until now in Shemot (Exodus), we have been carried along by the sweep and drama...
A Nation of Leaders
This week's parsha (Bible portion) consists of two episodes that seem to be a study in contrasts. In the first, in chapter 18, Yitro, Moses'...
Looking Up to the Hopeful Horizon
The Israelites had crossed the Red Sea. The impossible had happened. The mightiest army in the ancient world - the Egyptians with their horse-drawn chariots...
Real Leaders Focus on the Future and Education
To gain insight into the unique leadership lesson of this week's parsha, I often ask an audience to perform a thought-experiment. Imagine you are the...
How to Succeed? Fail, Get Up, and Try Again
At first, Moses' mission seemed to be successful. He had feared that the people would not believe in him, but God had given him signs...
The Tradition of Women as Leaders
This week's parsha (bible portion) could be entitled "The birth of a leader." We see Moses, adopted by Pharaoh's daughter, growing up as a prince...
Failure is Not the End
The Bible's first book, Bereishit, ends on a sublime note of reconciliation between Joseph and his brothers. His brothers were afraid that he had not...
A Real Leader Is One Who Repents
I was once present when the great historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis, was asked to predict the course of events in the Middle East. He...
