Soap opera-like debacles have stunned, stupefied, and dismayed our community. We have witnessed a prime minister, governors, and men of stature plummet to the depths of scandal and ignominy. Especially disconcerting and the epitome of paradox is when revered men, charged to exemplify God’s Word, purportedly disgrace His Word instead. Why do great men fall?
Lord Acton famously said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men .”
Why is it that great men, predominantly, become bad men?
Research published recently in Psychological Science showed that power tends to corrupt and to promote a hypocritical tendency to hold other people to a higher standard than oneself. The research also demonstrated that powerful people not only abuse the system but also feel entitled to abuse it.
According to Professor Deborah Gruenfeld, a social psychologist at Stanford University who focuses on the study of power, “When people feel powerful, they stop trying to control themselves.”
An article in the San Francisco Chronicle summed up the research as follows: People with power tend to be more oblivious to what others think, more likely to pursue the satisfaction of their own appetites, poorer judges of other people’s reactions, more likely to hold stereotypes, overly optimistic and more likely to take risks.
In other words, Gruenfeld and her colleagues discovered that powerful people tend to have a heightened sensitivity to their own internal states and a reduced sensitivity to others.
Perhaps this is why the Torah’s regulations for a Jewish king are so strict. For instance, a Jewish king must keep in his possession a Torah scroll (according to several meforshim it was worn as an amulet) to remind him of his subservience to the Law, “lest his heart becomes haughty over his brethren and he departs from God’s commandments right or left ” (Devarim 17:20).
The king was only allowed to divest himself of his personal Torah when attending to personal needs, such as using the lavatory (see Maimonides, Hilchos Melachim 3:1). The Torah scroll functioned as a perpetual admonition to the king not to abuse power, behave superciliously, or act above the law.
It seems from Sefer HaChinuch that arrogance and self-centeredness is the prime cause for turpitude in a leader’s rule. The Jewish king, or leader, is commanded to place every self-interest aside and act solely in the service of the people, following the law of the Torah.
Reporters were astounded at the estimated 300,000-500,000 people who attended Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach’s funeral in 1995. Most of the journalists had never heard of him. After a thorough search of encyclopedias and computerized archives for information on this heretofore uncelebrated personality, they were baffled that they came up with virtually no information.
The quintessential Jewish leader throughout the ages – whether it was Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, Maimonides, the Vilna Gaon, Rabbi Akiva Eiger, the Chofetz Chaim, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach (or any one in the constellation of illustrious rabbinic personalities that have graced the Jewish world throughout the millennia) – was not necessarily renowned for charisma, elocution, or popularity (there is no ballot that elects a Jewish leader). Rather, it is the intense sincerity, integrity, selflessness, and, above all, infusion of Torah into their lifeblood that are responsible for the seemingly gratuitous selection and adulation of these outstanding men.
Nor does education or knowledge insure a leader’s virtue, tenacious commitment to morality or lack of corruptibility. This fact is poignantly illustrated by the following accounts.
Michael Wildt of Hamburg University, in his book Generation Des Unbedingten, chronicles that the SS forces, those who ran the concentration camps, were comprised of some of the most educated people in German society. An elite of intellectuals and academics – a consortium of Ph.D.s in literature, philosophy, law, history, and science – directed the genocide.
A famous story is told about Bertrand Russell when he was professor of ethics at Harvard. Russell was engaged in eyebrow-raising sexual antics that were highly unacceptable in Boston in the early 20th century. The dean, especially irate that a professor of ethics should be acting so unethically, summoned him and excoriated him for his behavior. Russell rejoined: “I was a professor of geometry at Cambridge, but no one ever expected me to be a triangle or a square.”
