Why do so few people turn to Jewish text for insights on leadership?
A. One reason is the ‘myth of powerlessness’–to talk about effective leadership in a geopolitical sense, you frequently think of people who are in power who exercise leadership. For much of Jewish history, Jews were not in positions of power, and didn’t have political sovereignty, and there is a myth that runs through Jewish thinking that people in power have theories of leadership and people who never have power don’t really have theories. That’s a misreading of Jewish history. Even in Medieval Europe, when Jews were second-class citizens, they had opportunities to exercise leadership within their own communities and forge coalitions with the non-Jewish world. [Another] possibility exists that the organized Jewish community looks at the great business schools in America as the only source of insight into leadership and would never consider the Jewish tradition because they feel like religious writings are not on the same par as graduate business schools. It’s not either/or. It can be
