Leadership, Passover and Maintaining Our Humanity

Soon we will sit at our Seder tables perhaps more able, as a result of this past year’s challenges, to appreciate freedom and the oncoming spring of our our chag ha-aviv (holiday of springtime). This year we may have even used language reminiscent of the exodus story in startling, unexpected ways. We understand what a plague might have felt like. We know about being quarantined in our homes. We have felt constrained and even oppressed at times. Although we are commanded to relive the exodus experience, we all know that whatever we say and do will still be only a small measure of what our ancestors suffered. But there is one word we are told we cannot used again to describe anyone: slave. The Talmud tells us that, "Anyone who calls another a slave should be ostracized" (BT Kiddushin 28b).

We never use the word “slave” lightly following our own experience of servitude in Egypt. We go as far as to ostracize someone for this verbal crime because it undermines a foundational value of Judaism: the right and autonomy to determine who we are. We believe that free will and the agency to determine our own future is the inherent right of all human beings regardless of status.

Maimonides, in his “Laws of Indentured Servants” deals with the problematic tension of having too much power over another that helps us understand the Talmud’s statement. Even if a person has servants, he or she must be vigilant about their fair treatment and generous to a fault:

… the way of the pious and the wise is to be compassionate and to pursue justice, not to overburden or oppress a servant. One must provide for them from every dish and every drink. The early sages would give their servants from every dish on their table … you should not denigrate a servant, neither physically nor verbally … Do not treat him with constant verbal abuse and anger, rather speak to him pleasantly and listen to his complaints. Such were the good ways in which Job took pride when he said, "Did I ever despise the judgment of my servant and my maid when they argued with me? Did not my Maker make him, too, in the belly; did not the same One form us both in the womb?"

Today we are blessedly more sensitive to abuse in the workplace. Without even knowing Maimonides’s writings, we understand that compassion and fairness should be a hallmark of leadership, a relationship that can be fraught with power imbalance. It’s fascinating that Maimonides included the most famous sufferer of the Bible – Job – in this discussion. Job says in his defense that he always respected the views of his servants – not merely out of kindness or grace but because both servant and master have the same Creator. The same God made us all. 

And yet, sometimes even when we are careful in hierarchal relationships to treat people fairly and kindly, we don’t always intervene when we see leaders mistreating others. It might be a CEO humiliating a staff member or a lay person demeaning a professional or the other way around. When we don’t use our human agency to prevent injustice in ways great and small, we, too, minimize that godliness in ourselves. Leaving slavery on a metaphoric level is saying farewell to relationships where those in positions of authority lord it over those who have little power. There are still those among us who have not yet left Egypt.

Ironically, being a slave to power is one of the ways we injure our freedoms. Leaders beware. Those who work for you may actually be more free than you are. Harriet Tubman so beautifully said, "I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves." We are blessed to know and treasure our freedom. But sometimes we are still enslaved to old notions of power. Passover invites us to challenge them and liberate ourselves that we may liberate others. 

During COVID, we at the George Washington University’s Mayberg Center have been thinking a lot about collaboration as a form of liberation. We’ve collaborated with amazing thinkers through our leadership lunches to discuss political healing, diversity, disabilities and inclusion. We’ve worked together in meaningful partnerships with Prizmah, JPro, the Jewish Education Project and Federations across North America Prizmah – to name only a few – to expand the power of ideas that liberate the mind and help leaders in schools and non-profits manage the ever-changing demands of our current uncertainties. And the work we’ve done with HIAS on articulating the Jewish values that inform the protection and resettlement of refugees and asylum seekers has extended the meaning of Passover’s message to current world problems. Our freedom can never come at the expense of another’s. Our freedom demands that we continually see the freedom of others. 

With blessings for a beautiful Passover.