The Jewish Power Blog: Powerless Leaders
According to Jeremiah chapter 38, during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem (587 BCE), the prophet is sent to prison for prophesying that rebellion against Babylon will lead to destruction – that Babylonian rule must be accepted as a punishment for the nation’s sins. One day King Zedekiah has Jeremiah brought up from the prison secretly, to ask him what will be.
This is what the Lord has shown me if you refuse to surrender… They will bring out all your wives and children to the Chaldeans, and you yourself will not escape from them – You will be captured by the king of Babylon, and this city shall be burned down. Zedekiah said to Jeremiah, “Don’t let anyone know about this conversation, or you will die.” (Jer. 38:21-4)
The prophecy shortly came true. Later, the Talmud relates an episode during the Great Revolt against Rome in 67-73 CE:
The biryonim (extremist rebels) were then [in the city]. The Rabbis said to them, “Let us go and make peace with [the Romans],” but they wouldn’t let them, saying, “Let us go and fight them.” The Rabbis said to them, “You cannot succeed.” So [the biryonim] arose and burned the supplies of wheat and barley, and there was a famine. Abba Sikra, the head of the biryonim in Jerusalem, was the nephew of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, who invited him to meet in secret. When he came, [the rabbi] said to him, “How long will you continue thus—until you have killed everyone by starvation?” He answered, “What can I do? If I say anything to them they will kill me!” (Bab. Talmud Gitin 56a)
The parallelism is interesting: two examples of leaders who are – or who perceive themselves to be – powerless to lead. They seem to be trapped, dragged by their followers (!) into knowingly acting against the better interests of those followers and themselves. The question is: are they really powerless, or just using that claim to absolve themselves of responsibility for the impending disaster? Or perhaps they realize that they are indeed no longer leaders, having lost their moral authority to unnamed others? Or are they afraid that that is what will happen if they take what seems to be an unpopular stand – so they are paralyzed by this fear?
Zedekiah and Abba Sikra, in these stories, despite their status as leaders, seem not to be making history but to being swept along by it, helpless. What would have happened if the king had stood up to his warmongering nobles and decreed a cessation of hostilities and negotiations for surrender? Would they have deposed him? assassinated him and put a puppet in his place? But even if so, mightn’t his act have undermined the “together we will win” ideology? And what if Abba Sikra had taken a stand against the mentality of messianic desperation that seems to have infected his followers? And if they indeed killed him for doing so, mightn’t his courageous act have changed some minds? In both cases, we of course cannot know “what might have been.” Maybe indeed both leaders would have just died and been forgotten as the juggernaut of history charged forward to destruction. But maybe, just maybe, they might have contributed to derailing it.
The prophet Ezekiel relates a vision (chap. 9) during the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, in which a mark is placed on the foreheads of those who had been faithful to God, so that they will be spared; anyone, even elders, women, children –without the mark would be killed. The Talmud (Bab. Talmud Shabbat 55a) embellishes the story: the “prosecuting angel” asks God, “What is the difference between those selected for the mark and those not?” The answer: “These are wholly righteous; the others are wholly wicked.” “But,” says the angel, “the righteous could have tried to intervene, to influence the wicked, but they didn’t.” God responds: “It is obvious to Me that their attempts at intervention would have failed to change the behavior of the wicked!” “Ah,” says the angel, “obvious to You – but was it obvious to them?” God backs down, and the slaughter begins “with the elders who were in front of the Temple.” (Ezek. 9:6)
God may have the omniscience to know when our reproof, our protest, our intervention will turn the tide – or when it will just provoke the beast and even make things worse. But we don’t.
So are Zedekiah and Abba Sikra to be pitied for their tragic fate or condemned for their failure of leadership? It’s a quandary. And what about us? Indeed, what about us?
