This week’s Torah portion deals with Moses’ leadership in an unimaginable crisis: the Egyptian army is closing in on the Israelites, the sea is raging ahead, and on both sides there is only desert. Complete uncertainty and a situation in which decisions must be made quickly.
The insights from this moment can accompany us deeply into the business world, offering tools that translate directly into leadership and management. There are moments when a manager stands before an organizational “Red Sea.” The data doesn’t align, pressure from the board intensifies, employees look at him with questioning eyes—and he himself doesn’t really know the right step. In such moments, a familiar temptation arises: to stop. To wait. To speak about “vision,” about “trusting the process,” about how “reality will become clearer.”
Sometimes your advisors will tell you to run to the media in the name of “transparency,” to update before you lose control of the narrative—only to send the situation into an even greater spiral.
Rabbi Isaac Arama, in his philosophical work Akeidat Yitzhak, reads the story of the splitting of the Red Sea precisely through this tension—and offers a sharp interpretation that is surprisingly relevant to management today.
According to him, Moses’ words to the people—“Do not be afraid… stand firm and see the salvation of the Lord”—are not an expression of the confidence a leader is supposed to instill. On the contrary: they were a hidden prayer and cry. Moses himself did not know what to do, and the stance he proposed to the people was one of passive waiting. The waiting, the talk about salvation, were themselves a form of prayer: shifting responsibility upward, toward what lies beyond the human sphere of action.
Then comes the divine response: “Why do you cry out to Me? Speak to the children of Israel and let them journey.”
This is a sharp moment. Not a time to wait, not a time to deepen the value-based discourse, not a time for prayer—this is the moment for action. Moses is required to raise his staff and take a symbolic yet concrete step. The people are required to enter the sea before it splits.
From a managerial perspective, this is one of the sharpest texts ever written on the limits of “spiritual” passivity.
General philosophy is well acquainted with this pattern. Aristotle distinguished between theoretical knowledge and phronesis—practical wisdom. It is not enough to understand the good; one must know how to act amid uncertainty. Kierkegaard wrote about the “leap of faith” that is not resolved by further reflection but by decision. Even Camus argued that the absurd is not resolved through explanation, but through the choice to act despite uncertainty.
Akeidat Yitzhak anticipates them all: there is a stage in which prayer—or in modern language, values discourse, vision, strategy—turns from a source of strength into a mechanism of delay. A manager can speak endlessly about organizational culture, meaning, and trust, and in practice avoid the decision that frightens him.
And the deep insight: God does not reject prayer. He assigns it a time. There is a time to cry out, and a time to move forward.
A senior business leader shared an important principle with me this week: everyone waits for redemption, cries and asks for it—but it only arrives when you take actions that justify eligibility for redemption. There is a time to speak and a time to act.
When I was CEO of a startup called Interactive in its early days, we experienced a moment of crisis. The money ran out, the promised funding did not arrive, and we decided to act. We laid off employees, changed the technology, committed to revenue, raised a small round—and eventually, thank God, it succeeded.
Another case was the acquisition of Fiverr. I was at a conference in France when the CEO of the acquiring company told me there was no chance the deal would be completed. Beyond prayers, I asked him what could be done, how could we influence the outcome? He said maybe a meeting with the shareholder would help, but the chance of that happening was close to zero.
Despite this, I chose to act. I met him in London, he was convinced, and despite all the doubts and the major crisis, the deal went through, thank God.
In recent weeks, a fascinating phenomenon has been unfolding: three of the largest banks in the economy—Leumi, Hapoalim, and Mizrahi-Tefahot—have been raising tens of billions of dollars in bonds worldwide, using international underwriting firms, with strong participation from investors across the globe. The conclusion is clear: they cannot afford not to act when reality changes. They must diversify and expand their future funding sources, increase exposure to foreign investors, and enable flexibility in managing assets and liabilities. They are not waiting—they are simply choosing to act.
Mature management is tested in the ability to recognize the transition between these two stages: knowing when it is right to stop, reflect, and articulate meaning—and when waiting itself becomes more dangerous than making a mistake. Sometimes, only movement creates clarity. Only entering “into the sea” reveals that it indeed splits.
Perhaps this is one of the most precise definitions of leadership: not someone who always knows what will happen—but someone who understands when waiting is no longer an option and is willing to pay the price of acting, even at the risk of being wrong.