To Lead, Follow
“Lift the head of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by their families, by their father’s house, according to the number of names, every male, by their scalp.” - Numbers 1:2
There is an odd temptation we humans feel to join a mob. Elias Canetti identified the attraction in our deepest urge: to murder without penalty, and in our greatest fear: dying alone. War is this desire and fear’s ultimate expression and therefore our greatest manifestation of our tendency toward collective madness.
Humanity’s perpetual question is how it can avoid this fate.
The above biblical passage opens the book of Numbers, so named because it starts with this census of the children of Israel. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks proposed that the point of God’s odd command to count Israel by “lifting the head” was to never lose sight of the individual within a crowd.
Even in a massive crowd where, to human eyes, faces blur into a mass, God still relates to us as individuals, not as members of a crowd… taking a census must always be done in such a way as to signal that we are valued as individuals. We each have unique gifts. There is a contribution only I can bring. To lift someone’s head means to show them favor, to recognize them. It is a gesture of love.
For Sacks then the way God instructs us to steer the crowd away from its dangerous temptations is to insist always on keeping sight of each individual, no matter how vast the sea of collective humanity.
For leadership, the implication is clear: embrace the more difficult path of treating your followers each as the unique and valuable individuals they are, instead of relating to them through fear or hate (the most easily communicated emotions to the masses) no matter how numerous they may be.
But that still leaves us with the question of what to do when the crowd itself goes mad? It is easy to blame the tyrant with a shaking fist for a crowd’s insanity, but a demagogue and his or her followers build and reinforce one another. Often, it is the mob who demands and brings forth the tyrant, as in Star Wars when Palpatine declares himself emperor to thunderous applause.
The Bible’s most famous episode of collective madness was the worship in the desert of a golden calf while Moses was on the mountain receiving Revelation. So, too, is its most relevant example of leadership in the face of mass psychosis, and it comes in the surprising figure of Aaron’s seeming acquiescence to the mob’s demands. For while Aaron himself built the calf, and even requested from the children of Israel the gold he used to create it, he was left strangely unpunished. Surely Aaron, Moses’ brother and the High Priest, the second in command until his own death in the desert, was the natural leader while Moses was busy on the mountain. If anyone was responsible for redirecting Israel’s passions it would be him, yet he not only fails to do that but seems to actively encourage Israel’s lawlessness. Why does he escape censure?
Rashi found an answer in the manner in which Aaron asked for the gold he needed to build the calf.
Remove the golden rings that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.
This, Rashi explained, was a way for Aaron to gently defuse the children of Israel’s longing by asking them to give something they would be reluctant to ask their loved ones to part with, in the hope that Moses would return during the delay and then soothe their passions. His mistake was therefore only to underestimate the idolatrous passion that had overtaken the crowd, even infecting the women, who parted gladly with their earrings.
A leader’s responsibilities then in the face of a mob is to keep a level head, and, without joining the mob, seek to gently redirect and defuse its passion. The implications for our own behavior when faced with the mob and the temptation to join it are to – in our own way and as well as we can – maintain our calm, and do the boring, necessary thing. Keep matters practical, and specific. If we are to make a golden calf, we must take the gold from somewhere, and it seems the only available source is in the ears of our wives. Do you think they will be happy for us to take it?
Because the allure of the crowd is the license it grants to behave badly, the antidote is to accept the responsibility that the crowd promises to release you from. Instead of being wrapped into the latest, wildest, newest fury to look for guidance instead from what has come before, and ask yourself what was done that made things work. What were the tasks that ordinary people, people like yourself, took up in the before times that kept the crowds at bay?
Seriously asked, the answers to these questions lead inevitably to small, pedestrian acts of responsibility. It is much more satisfying to think of oneself as a hero with the potential with one or a series of extraordinary acts of solving some problem in a grand fashion. To face down and defeat Voldemort in a final duel. To kill in one swift action Daenerys Targaryen before she becomes a tyrant.
For each of us, there are indeed large and pregnant moments that may not affect millions of people or have the drama of a contest of spells by wizards but that do matter a great deal. More often though and for most of us no such satisfaction is forthcoming, and responsibility must be found in the deeply prosaic.
It comes when everyone is saying an odd new slogan and you decide not to say it too. It is present when you quietly ignore an immoral directive, even when it is listed on an official sign and everyone else is playing along. And it appears every time you take seriously a responsibility that comes with no prestige or treasure but simply needs to be done, from picking up a scrap of garbage on the street to showing up at the PTA meeting.
A genius of the religious life as conceived by the Bible is that it provides endless opportunities for taking this kind of responsibility. Every festival is a new opportunity to do something that is boring, necessary, and infused with meaning. Every daily command is a chance to do (or not do) a single, small, unrecognized, important thing. And every community appeal is a chance to drop a sliver of gold into a bucket that, fused with the contributions of others united by obedience to a set of commands given by a loving Creator, helps point a crowd away from a mob and toward a holy community.