Why I’m reading the Torah for leadership lessons
What this series is, and why I’m writing it.
Torah interpretations through the Bridge6 leadership model
This is the third week of a series I’m writing here on Times of Israel, reading the weekly Torah portion for what it says about leadership. A friend who read the first post told me, very kindly but directly, that it came out of the blue with no context. He was right, so this post is the introduction I should have written first.
I am a native New Yorker, raised in one of the most linguistically diverse cities on earth, and drawn from early on to languages, cultures, foreign tastes and sounds, and to understanding other people. Growing up Jewish in New York is not extraordinary. But being Jewish once you leave it is. Step outside the cozy Jewish confines of the city, and your identity comes into sharp contrast with everything around it. I have spent most of my adult life outside the United States, and my career moved from education to entertainment to international development, and then into leadership in high-stakes development cooperation projects.
In the aftermath of October 7th, 2023, I started my own practice and leaned into the parts of my Jewish identity that I had learned to leave at the door in the international development world. Leaving it at the door meant hiding who I was and keeping my opinions to myself in rooms where revealing either felt unwelcome, or unsafe. I have been building a leadership model that draws on Jewish thought and I am now using it to read the Torah for what it says about leading. That is this series.
The Bridge6 model is still developing, and I expect it always will be. A model that stops being revised has stopped being tested. It is a window, a way of seeing the patterns in how leaders, teams, and whole collaboration systems actually work, where the capacity is missing, and where the trouble a leader is feeling in one place is being produced somewhere else.
Over time I started to look at almost every situation through that window. The Torah is full of stories, including many that speak to leadership: people leaving home to start something new, families dividing what they’ve built, leaders who stay silent when they should speak, and strangers trying to make themselves understood. Each week, the calendar hands me a portion. I read it that way and write down what I find.
For me the Torah is a guide that allows for the discussion of many topics from many perspectives. The stories don’t seem to me to be absolutely prescriptive. They introduce discussion topics and it’s up to the readers to dissect and explore. As Ben Bag Bag says, “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it” (Pirkei Avot 5:22). So, what I write each week is my reading, not the only reading, and I expect readers to see things I’ve missed.
My sense is that this matters more now than it did a few years ago. Extreme voices are taking up more and more space and algorithms push people toward narrower views. That makes thoughtful leadership and real collaboration both harder and more necessary. The challenges in these stories are ones I see in my work: rest and limits, which I wrote about in Bereshit; teams working across cultures, in Noach; and next week, families in business together, in Lech-Lecha. The Torah offers these stories as a spiritual guide, and I also find them a practical starting point for how to lead and work together.
Each post follows the same shape: what jumps out at me in the week’s reading, a story or two from my own work, and a short numbered list of leadership lessons. I’ll name a part of the model where it helps and explain it in plain words. It will be interesting to see where the year of readings takes me, and what readers bring to the discussion.
