A king was only to be appointed at the request of the people. According to Ibn Ezra, the appointment of a king was a permission, not an obligation. Abarbanel held that it was a concession to human frailty. Rabbeinu Bachya regarded the existence of a king as a punishment, not a reward. In short, Judaism is at best ambivalent about monarchy; that is to say, about leadership-as-power.
On the other hand, its regard for teachers is almost unlimited. “Let the fear of your teacher be as the fear of heaven,” says the Talmud (Pesachim 108b). Respect and reverence for your teacher should be greater even than respect and reverence for your parents, rules Rambam (Hilchot Talmud Torah 5:1), because parents bring you into this world while teachers give you entrance to the World to Come.
When someone exercises power over us, he or she diminishes us. But when someone teaches us, he or she helps us grow. That is why Judaism, with its acute concern for human dignity, favors leadership-as-education over leadership-as-power. And it began with Moses, at the end of his life.
For twenty-two years as a chief rabbi, I have carried with me the following quotation from one of the greatest leaders of the Zionist movement, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Although he was a secular Jew, he was enough of a historian and Bible scholar to understand this dimension of leadership, and said so in eloquent words:
Whether you hold humble office in a municipality or in a small union, or high office in a national government, the principles are the same: you must know what you want to achieve, be certain of your aims, and have these goals constantly in mind. You must fix your priorities. You must educate your party, and must educate the wider public. You must have confidence in your people – often greater than they have in themselves, for the true political leader knows instinctively the measure of man’s capacities and can rouse him to exert them in times of crisis.
You must know when to fight your political opponents, and when to mark time. You must never compromise on matters of principle. You must always be conscious of the element of timing, and this demands a constant awareness of what is going on around you – in your region if you are a local leader, in your country and in the world if you are a national leader. And since the world never stops for a moment, and the pattern of power changes its elements like the movement of a kaleidoscope, you must constantly reassess chosen policies toward the achievement of your aims. A political leader must spend a lot of time thinking. And he must spend a lot of time educating the public, and educating them anew.
The poet Shelley once said: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Whether this is true or false, I do not know, but this I know: there is all the difference between giving people what they want and teaching them what to want.
Teachers are the unacknowledged builders of the future, and if a leader seeks to make lasting change, he or she must follow in the footsteps of Moses and become an educator. The leader-as-teacher – using influence not power, spiritual and intellectual authority rather than coercive force – was one of the greatest contributions Judaism ever made to the moral horizons of humankind. It can be seen most clearly in Sefer Devarim when Moses, for the last month of his life, summoned the next generation and taught them laws and lessons that would survive, and inspire, as long as there are human beings on earth.