Parshat Vayikra/ Blessing to Ehud Olmert

To the Honorable Prime Minister-elect Ehud Olmert,

Mazal tov on your election. Now that you are (or will soon become) prime minister, I want to share with you three principles of leadership we find in this week's Torah reading. . It is my humble prayer that these principles of Hebrew wisdom guide your leadership of our country.

The book of Leviticus begins with the verse, "And God called Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting". The great Chassidic master Nachum of Chernobyl asks an obvious question: Why does God need to call him? Why does this verse not begin like so many other biblical verses: "God spoke to Moses, saying…"?

Reb Nachum answers that in order to be a true leader, one must experience himself as being called by God. For biblical man, "to live" means "to be addressed." And to be addressed means to be called by a personal destiny, one that is vital to the world and can be fulfilled by that individual alone. Many streams in contemporary psychology refer to man's sense of vocation as either "character disorder" or " false grandiosity."

Agent of God

But the truth is that man is truly grand and powerful. The great understanding of biblical consciousness is that man is literally an agent of God. In the language of the Talmud, "the patriarchs are the chariot of the Shechina," referring to the female presence of God in the world.

In more contemporary parlance, you Ehud Olmert are privileged to act as God's nouns and adjectives, and most importantly as God's verbs. It is not insane to experience yourself as the messenger of God. Indeed it is the very essence of sanity.

For to be sane is to know reality. And the partnership between man and God is the demarcating feature of reality in the biblical vision of the world. God called Moses, and in a very different way, He has now called Ehud.

But remember that being called does not mean you are always right. That is George Bush's great mistake. Rather, it is the ability to access the internal experience of being called by God that gives a leader the power and courage to act in times of uncertainty.

Second, when Moses receives the divine command, it is the commandment to sacrifice. Leadership requires sacrifice. Sacrifice means giving up something that is precious to you.

At some critical juncture of your leadership you will be called to give something up. This will not be easy for you. After all, you came to political prominence by pursuing power.

And yet once you've achieved power is achieved in some deep inner place you must reject it in order to retain it. Indeed this is part of what you told me when we went jogging together several years ago in Jerusalem, as part of your appearance on my television show.

You said then that great leadership requires sacrifice. This is the quality I am describing. The Kabbalists teach that one can have only truly have power if you are willing to give it up. There must be a serious set of principles one must be willing to give up power in order to defend.

The third and final principle of leadership is the principle of love. The ability to sacrifice can only be developed if it emerges from a matrix of radical and unconditional love.

According to the Kabbalists the world comes into being through an act of divine sacrifice motivated by love. A leader must be madly in love with his or her people, and to be willing to sacrifice anything for their good.

The Kabbalists also teach that Moses has one defect. He was madly in love with God but not sufficiently in love with man. To be a messenger of God is insufficient. One must love God's beloved human beings even more then one loves God.

Elijah's punishment

He does battle with King Ahab, literally brother and father, representing a deep identification with the people. But God is not happy with Elijah's zealotry for truth and God at the expense of the people, so He decides, as it were, that Elijah will not die.

Instead Elijah lives in every generation. He appears at every Pesach seder and circumcision ceremony, so that he might learn to appreciate the full beauty and heroism of the people.

Israel is filled with anonymous heroes, Ehud, but they need not only your wisdom but also your love.

To be a leader then is to know in the deepest recesses of your being that you are a messenger of God. You must be ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of your calling and to be a greatest lover of man.