[May 23, 2017] This past Friday I attended a Rehearsal Dinner for a wedding scheduled the next day. At the dinner I had an interesting and entertaining conversation with a young Jewish man who told me that in Judaism there is a dedicated effort to explain confusing language in the written and oral Torah. This is not that different to leadership which always means to strive for clarity.
He explained it well and provided me some insight into what is called “Midrash.” As I’ve written before here in theLeaderMaker.com, good leadership is concerned with absolute clarity and we see that in Judaism there is an effort to do just that. The example he gave was an explanation of how the Messiah rode a donkey out to see a man but walked home.
This inconsistency (and other inexplicable things) can confuse people and a body of Jewish rabbinical texts has a “running commentary on specific passages.”1 What I found of interest was that much of the Midrash are from the first ten centuries since Christ’s birth. The purpose he told me was to resolve problems of interpretation of difficult passages of the Hebrew Bible.
Such an effort to intentionally do this is admirable. I know of no other long-term effort that is so formalized and logically based. The U.S. military has a similar procedure in their effort to keep things simple and clear. It is called “mission analysis” and also uses formalized methods and processes to get to the heart of any particular problem by eliminating as much risk and confusion as possible.
As I understand it, the genesis of Midrash is that it was meant “to seek, study, inquire.” It is a given that this is a fundamental trait of leadership in its application. Like any qualitative application of such an effort to get at the truth, Midrash is concerned with all facets of meaning: plain, deep, comparative, and hidden (or mysterious) meanings.
The main idea, as I understand it from our conversation, is that many methods are used to derive a deeper meaning. All leaders are responsible to employ due diligence to reach greater understanding in those things that matter and to gain a deeper knowledge of them helps us reach the pinnacle of leadership and its connection to storytelling.
As storytellers, leaders emphasize key messages. This power brings a responsibility to be thoughtful, rigorous and careful in our analysis, and to remind others that while there may be different interpretations, our place as leaders is ultimately to care for our families, our team, and our community.
[Don’t forget to “Like” the Leader Maker at our Facebook Page.]
————————