The circus is in town

Read an article on Haaretz last year. Sadly can’t find the link online anymore. Thankfully, I had the gist copied elsewhere.

Partly reprinted here without any permission sought, nor given.

Moses was commanded to lead Israel from Egypt, but were he alive today, he likely wouldn’t pass the ratings test - an old man who began his leadership career at age 80, “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” as Exodus tells us, humble as any man alive. Not exactly the traits that advance a public servant nowadays.

“Suddenly an idea erupted within me to write a biblical drama called ‘Moses’,” dreamed the state’s visionary, Theodore (Benjamin Ze’ev) Herzl. “A great, powerful figure, filled with the strength of life and the spirit of humor… He is the leader because he does not want to be it. Everything is swayed to his will because he has no personal desires. His aim is not the fulfillment, but the wandering.”

A leader who didn’t want to lead, who saw himself as someone undeserving for the mission at hand, is certainly unfit to hold a leadership post in this day and age. “Who am I,” he asked God, “that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?”

And yet if the timetables were turned, who of this generation’s leaders would have been fit to lead the Israelites through the wilderness for 40 years?

How many could, like Moses, treat their brothers with patience, and without reporters and cameras, direct the lines of needy people growing month to month for today’s “bread of poverty” - as matzah is described in Scripture - or visit the factories sending home tens of thousands of workers?

How many of today’s leaders purified their hearts as shepherds for 40 years before seizing the staff of leadership? Who would dare shatter the tablets while the entire nation danced around the Golden Calf?

I doubt if any of the crop that passes as leaders today close to home & elsewhere are capable of shattering the tablets. They’re too busy dancing around the Golden Calf.

The circus is in town; Always been here - Guess it never left.