Are You A Leader? - The Parshah On Fire - Devarim

In what was one of the greatest speeches in human history, exactly 37 days before his death, Mosherenu got up to address the Jewish people and they're camped right on the borders of Israel. And the Jews were as close as they had ever been to finally entering the land that they had hoped and waited 40 years for. motion his final opportunity to teach and inspire the nation. He had so masterfully nurtured the last four decades. He gathered them all together and he cleared his throat and he addressed the entire people and the people leaned in and they were eager to hear what his parting words would be. Now Mosha's first choice of topic seems a bit strange. The very first thing that he spoke about was seemingly only applicable to less than 1% of the population. He began discussing laws regarding judges and leaders being fair and honest. He got up and said that leaders wise and discerning should lead you with impartiality and righteousness. That was the very first thing Moshe started with. And the question is why is that? Granted, proper leadership is an important topic. But is it more important than I don't know reminding us of the dangers of assimilation into the Cananani culture? Is it more important than the reminder to focus on spiritual pursuits like building up as miktas or to prevent the material aspect of the land from taking dominance? Is it more important than reminding us not to forget about Hashem as we settle into the land? Why was the reiteration of the importance of balanced and fair leadership and judgment the absolute first thing that Moshe imparted on his in his farewell speech? And we find a similar occurrence in the beginning of pureos. Perkyos, the authoritative guide book to the morals and the ideals of a Torah life does not begin with concepts like loving Hashem or kindness or the importance of the very first thing, not the second, not the third. The very first thing starts with is the importance of judges being patient and balanced while adjudicating judgment. It calls for the leaders of to think through their decisions well before making them. Why is that? Of all things what the official book of our morals and our ideals begins with it begins with that. Aren't there other ideas that seem far more foundational? How about start with saying every has a mitzvah to constantly fear and love Hashem? Or about start with the importance of or why is it that we address the judges and leaders first? So let's take a step back for a moment. Let me ask you a simple question. Ever wonder why the Jewish people often refer to their leaders by the they wrote and not by their actual names? If you would have gone back in the day to visit the grebba rahuda alter, you wouldn't tell the wagon driver to take you to the house of Rabbi Alar. You would tell them to bring you to the or when we talk about or we call them and we say stories about the Yeshua and the Yehuda. We read about the passion of the and the ley. Isn't that strange? Why don't we refer to them by their actual name? No other group in society does this. Nobody refers to Leo Toltoy as Mr. war and peace or if someone would meet JK Rowling on the street, they wouldn't run home and tell their friends that they saw Mrs. Harry Potter. So why do we do that with our leaders? I believe the answer is the following. I was once giving a class to a group of college kids in Highland Park, New Jersey, and I asked them the following question. If you were to walk into a bar and see your chemistry teacher from college just completely drunk and in a fist fight with someone, would you have any less respect for the material he teaches you the next day in class? And they all replied in the negative. They wouldn't really respect the material he teaches them the next day any less. Then I asked them if they were to walk into a bar and see their rabbi drunk and in a fist fight with someone, would they respect the rabbi's Torah class any less? And they all answered yes. And what's the difference between those two scenarios? The answer is that Torah is unlike any other subject in the world. Tyra is transformative knowledge. It is knowledge and wisdom that is supposed to transform and uplift its learners and teachers. Even parts of Tyra that are technical and procedural like the of farming or the makeup of a cow's esophagus all have spiritual sparks embedded in them which should elevate the learner to moral and ethical heights. So it stands to reason that a teacher of Tyra who did not become elevated by what he is teaching is likely an unqualified teacher. The Tyra's intrinsic holiness buried deep within it is meant to utterly transform and elevate those that allow their souls to tap into it. Therefore, our Tyra leaders, people who devoted their entire lives to the holy books of Tyra they authored have become completely transformed and elevated by the Svarim that they wrote. Therefore, the very name of their safer of their book becomes synonymous with the name of the author for it is to a certain degree the name of his soul. It's to a certain extent made him who he is and that is it is a man completely transformed by the Tyra. A Jewish king or or leader does far more than merely ensure that the general populace maintains peace and that no one ri no one riots and they ensure law and order. A Jewish Torah leader elevates the entire Jewish nation by elevating himself. We look to our leaders as our connectors to Hashem's Tyra and ideals. And therefore, if they are not balanced and righteous, they not only render the Tyra into a mere subject, they threaten to derail the entire Jewish people. They guide us and prod us and show us the right way of life. If they don't live a life of fairness and humility, then the general population will follow suit shortly after. When Moshe looked at the Jews poised and ready to enter the land of Artisel, he knew all too well that if the leaders they would follow would be morally corrupt and unholy, the very bedrock of the nation would crumble in order for the nation to flourish spiritually in the land of Artis. First and foremost, the most important thing was for the judges and the leaders and the teachers to be kind and patient and balanced and fair. No matter how concretized a society seems, if the leaders on top are hotty and dishonest and corrupt, that society will crumble almost 100% of the time. A clear example of this is ancient Rome. Ancient Rome was far more sophisticated than virtually any society that preceded it and more sophisticated than almost any society that came after it for close to a thousand years. They had a formal government with a Congress and elections. They had complex aqueducts and running water and sewer systems. They had an army that conquered the entire known world. So what went wrong? How did such a thing disintegrate? What caused the ruin of Rome? The answer is good old-fashioned greed. When the great deal Dio Cleathian died, a fight broke out amongst his successors. And before long, the lack of peace amongst the leaders drove the Roman Empire, perhaps the most complex and accomplished world empire in all of human history to an end. Because if there is corruption and hottiness at the top, there is very little hope for the bottom. That being said, there is still a puzzling point. If Moshe was calling attention to the importance of quality leadership, why did he address the entire people as a whole? Why not address just the leaders and future leaders? Perhaps the answer is that there is no one in the entirety of the Jewish people who is not at least on a small level a leader. Some people lead cities, some people lead communities, some people lead schools, and other people lead sisterhoods. Some people lead organizations, and some people lead households. It makes no difference if you're in a high ranking position or not. We all lead our own personal lives and leading a Tyra lifestyle is completely incompatible with hottiness and selfishness and unrighteousness. Leadership of any level requires humility and compassion and a heaping dose of selflessness. The moment we stepped foot into Ard is, we experienced a transformation from being sheep in Hashem's flock to becoming leaders fighting battles and leading and leaders building cities and leaders founding diverse communities and leaders building families. In his address to the Jewish people, Moshe pleaded with us to lead with balance and integrity, to be exemplary, and to recognize that our congregants and our students and our children look up to us. If we're selfish and dishonest, what hope is there for them? Each and every one of us is tasked with leading our precious children and implanting in them the Tyra and what it stands for. The very first mitzvah in the entire Tory is Peru ravu. It's not a mitzvah merely to have children and then drop them off somewhere and hope that they make it in life. There are two distinct commandments. There's Peru and then there's Ravu. The word Peru comes from the word pre just like fruit. Just like fruit are abundant and plentiful, so are we commanded to be abundant and plentiful. But then there's ravu, an additional mitzvah, which means to increase. And explains that we are commanded to increase rav and multiply our child, to expand him, to inject him with life and meaning and spirit. We are charged with raising him in the literal sense of the word from a life of mundane to a life of sanctity. If we are immoral and we are unqualified leaders of our own children. Therefore, Moshe began his speech by charging us to be humble and balanced and patient. And likewise, Pyavos begins with the need for our leaders to be patient. For if we fail at the top, we automatically fail at the bottom. One does not need to look very far to find individuals who led the world, be it politically or culturally, who prove to be some of the lowest human beings on earth. Some of the world's most famous philosophers and novelists and essaists and thinkers and writers and kings and emperors scraped the bottom of the human society barrel. Even religious institutions like the churches and the mosques were plagued for centuries with abuse and corruption and even outright moral decay. The most popular people on earth, the rock stars, the actors, the sports players whom billions and billions of people idolize and look up to are often extremely subpar humans at best and outright disgusting at worst. They are often caught in horrific scandals and bounce in and out of jail. These are the decadent individuals who adorn the posters on the walls of kids and teenagers around the world. These are the people that hundreds of billions of kids aspire to be like. We on the other hand are lucky to look up to leaders and have morals and values and backbones. Leaders that virtually never think selflessly. Leaders that almost never put themselves first. Our children adorn their walls with pictures of people who are balanced and kind and who encourage us to be caring, honest, humble, and righteous people. Moshe was not picked to lead the Jewish people because of his charisma and his flare. Moshe had a speech impediment that hindered every word he said. Rather, he was picked because he was a kind shepherd. He was picked because he was labeled by Hashem to be the humblest man on the face of the earth. Yoshua was not picked to lead the Jewish people because of his good looks or his oretary skills. The Mishna in the medish in Bame of Zion Tazb says that he was picked because he got up early to set up the benches of the room that Moshe taught to it was his humility and his care that propelled him to the role of leadership. The entire hak world follows the opinion of basil over bi not because they were smarter or because they displayed more intellectual prowess. The gimar inven says that we follow the lead of over shami because they were kinder and they were more patient than their counterparts. The entire Ashkanazi Torah world follows the leadership of a 16th century Polish scholar from the city of Krakow named Rav Mosha Israelis commonly known as the Rama. He realized that Jewish law hala was too vast for the typical person to learn it in its entirety. So he began working on a book organizing and condensing it. At the exact same time a Spanish living in named Caro was also working on a similar book. So instead of publishing his own safer and competing as would have almost certainly o occurred in every other arena in society with almost no exceptions the rama decided to allow the bisf to publish his safer and condensed his own safer to mere annotations of the basis. He displayed immense humility by giving up publishing his own safer and accordingly the name he chose to call his annotations summed up his tremendous mea best. While Raikaro's book was called thear the set table, Rav Misha Isurus called his annotations the mappa the tablecloth. That's who our leaders are. Our leaders are the ones who give us direction in our lives, nurturing and encouraging us. We look up to them from our youth as the ultimate role models in life. And we should be proud to claim such tremendous people as our leaders. Listen to this story. My family had a neighbor in Rochester named Gordon Letterman who tragically died young of cancer and he was a brilliant guy. He excelled in his studies and he eventually got into Harvard University. He was one of the only Orthodox Jews on campus at the time and he knew that he was different but it didn't bother him. He was proud of it. Harvard has a custom that every freshman delivers a short speech at the beginning of the year about an individual who inspires them with the room filled to capacity. Each freshman gets up and talks about a figure that they look up to. And so one student got up and talked about how he idolized John F. Kennedy and another talked about Michael Jordan and another person talked about how he is inspired by John Rockefeller. And after the crowd heard all about Bill Gates and Walt Disney and Martin Luther King and Marilyn Monroe and Edgar Hoover and Fidel Castro and Henry Ford, it was finally Gordon's turn. And he got up and he scanned the room. And being the only religious Jew present in a room filled with the world's future politicians and CEOs and Supreme Court judges, he was acutely aware of the attention on him as he began to speak. Gordon cleared his throat and he began I would like to talk about a man whom no one in this room has ever heard of. He lived in utter poverty in a little town in Europe that no one here has ever been to. And yet he led millions upon millions of people throughout his lifetime. His writings have been taught in every corner of the globe and has sold more copies than some of the world's best novelists. He had some of the smartest people on earth clamoring to get even a few words with him. His opinion was sought in virtually every area of life from the deepest most esoteric spiritual concepts to global geopolitical strategies. He was known by millions of people throughout the world as the greatest sage on the face of the earth. He had a steady stream of people waiting to talk to him for the duration of the day for the greater part of the over 100 years of his life. He would give as much attention to a foreign diplomat or governor as he would to a crying widow who had nothing to eat. He was enormously scrupulous, never to speak even a word of gossip and started a campaign to eradicate gossip on a global scale. He humbly led millions of people in the proper path in life, leading by example. He was the de very definition of kindness, loving, and caring. Despite having millions of people looking up to him as their leader, he lived in a one- room house with a dirt floor. Despite advising and guiding some of the wealthiest people on Earth, he could almost count his worldly possessions on both hands. This man was quite possibly the most selfless and humble man on the planet. This man, who you've never heard of, was referred to as the Kayim, the global leader of the Jewish people. And he is my inspiration. And with that, Gordon looked at the stunned audience, frozen in silence, and returned to his seat.