01 Apr VAYIKRA: LEADERSHIP IS SYNONYMOUS WITH SIN DON’T BE AFRAID TO MAKE MISTAKES

A man who wants to
lead the orchestra must
turn his back on the
crowd.—Max Lucado
When, Not If
This week’s parsha,
Vayikra (and much of
the book of Vayikra) is
about sacrifices, and though these laws have
been inoperative for almost 2000 years since
the destruction of the Temple, the moral
principles they embody and the messages they
contain are meaningful and inspiring.
The Torah in this parsha describes the various
kinds of sin offering, brought in the case of
inadvertent wrongdoing (shegagah). Four
different cases are considered: the anointed
priest (high priest), the community
(represented by the Sanhedrin or supreme
court), the Prince (Nasi, Leader, King), and an
ordinary individual. Because their roles in the
community were different, so too was the
form of their atonement.
In each of the above situations the Torah
raises the possibility of sin, with one glaring
exception. In three cases, the law is introduced
by the Hebrew word “im,” “if.” It is possible
that a high priest, the community, or an
individual may err.
However, when the Torah describes the
potential sin of a leader (a Nasi) the text reads:
“When a leader sins…”
Not if, but when.
The connotation seems troubling. With
individual Jews, there is possibility of sin. The
same can be said for the High Priest and the
Supreme Court. With leaders, however, there
is not the possibility of sin, but the probability
of sin. The question is not if, but when!
This is how the Zohar on Vayikra and the
15th-century Italian biblical commentator
Rabbi Ovadya Seforno understood the
wording of the verse:
After all, it is common that he will sin.
Why such pessimism? There are a few reasons
for this. At the dawn of history, the Torah
established a truth most famously verbalized
centuries later by the nineteenth-century
moralist Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg
Acton, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely.”
Yet, there is more to this. Because of the great
risks a leader must take, the assumption of a
leadership position carries with it the
inevitability of error. “A leader takes people
where they want to go; a great leader takes
people where they don’t necessarily want to
go, but ought to be,” is the old saying. To be a
leader, to deal with diverse people, to be
creative, innovative and decisive, to make
difficult and heart-wrenching decisions,
guarantees mistakes.
The leader must, for example, decide whether
to send his soldiers into battle or keep them
home. Which decision is correct? Sending
your soldiers to war will almost certainly
result in deaths. Keeping them home, may
allow your enemy to conquer the country.

These are some of the painstaking decisions
leaders must make.
Four Saints
If sin and leadership are synonymous, does
the Torah’s moral system discourage the
assumption of leadership?
For this we will introduce an enigmatic
Talmudic passage. The Talmud states:
Four people died only because of the advice
of the snake (meaning, they never committed
any sins, they only died because of Adam and
Chava eating from the Eitz Hada’as which
introduced the reality of death into human
life. Binyamin, the son of Yaakov; Amram the
father of Moshe; Yishai the father of Dovid,
and Kileab the son of Dovid.
There is something amiss here. Think of all
the great people of our nation who are
excluded from this list: Avraham, Yitzchak
and Yaakov; Sara, Rivka, Rochel and Leah;
the other eleven sons of Yaakov including
Binyamin’s older and beloved brother Yosef,
known as Yosef HaTzaddik, Yosef the
righteous one. Moshe, the greatest prophet,
teacher and leader of Israel about whom the
Torah states that “there never arose a prophet
like Moshe whom G-d knew face to face.”
Aaron, the Kohen Gadol, Yehoshua, Shmuel,
and many more, are not on the list. Our
greatest giants did not make it into the Who’s
Who list of sinless people. Instead, the list
consists of four relatively anonymous persons:
Binyamin, Amram, Yishai and Kileab. Why?
Also, the Talmudic identification of each of
these four individuals is strange. Each of them
is mentioned with his father’s name or his
son’s name. Why doesn’t the Talmud simply
list their names as it does with most biblical
characters? Why identify each historical
figure by his relationship to another:
Binyamin, the son of Yaakov; Amram, the
father of Moshe; Yishai, the father of Dovid;
Kileab, the son of Dovid?
The Talmud intimates an extraordinary idea:
Our greatest heroes are not the ones who
never sinned, but rather the ones who actually
committed mistakes (relative to their spiritual
level). Because when you are a leader it is not
a question of “if” but of “when.”
Binyamin, Amram, Yishai and Kileab all died
sinless because they lived a life of isolation.
They did not deal much with people; they did
not take responsibility for the generation; they
did not get enmeshed in the affairs of the
community. In short, they did not get their
hands dirty; hence they remained untarnished.
Yaakov, Moshe, and Dovid are not said to
have died only “due to the snake.” According
to the Torah, Avraham, Yaakov, and Moshe
committed mistakes—relative to their sublime
state of spiritual greatness. Relative to their
standing, there was some form of “cheit”—
lack and void Why? Not because they were
not noble and holy men; but because they
were leaders in a really crazy world, and by
the very nature of their role, perfection is
impossible.
This may be why the Talmud gives us the

names of each of these four saints with another
name. In a rather elegant way, the Talmud
wants us to compare each of these four saintly
spotless individuals to a more well-known
relative: Yaakov, Moshe, and Dovid. It wants
us to recall that despite the greatness of these
four men, our greatest honor is reserved to
these other relatives, who made it their
responsibility to illuminate a dark world.
The Hermit
If you are a hermit, if you don’t do anything,
you will never be criticized, nor will you
make mistakes. Inaction, by definition, does
not lend itself to error. Action always lends
itself to error. When you do things, you will be
scrutinized and criticized; someone will
always have what to say and you are prone to
error. So although we have a place in our
hearts for the four individuals who never
sinned, because they remained aloof; although
we pay tribute to spiritual saints who don’t
hurt a fly and remain immaculate, and we
ought to learn from them and be inspired by
them, nonetheless we remind ourselves of
those individuals who were even greater than
the sinless saints—because they did “sin,”
because they did commit errors. They went
out and made a radical difference in people’s
lives; they sought to change the world.
I recall standing one Shabbos afternoon in a
synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem. A
man approached the great sage Rabbi Adin
Even Yisroel (Shteinsaltz) and asked him if he
had any regrets in life. Rabbi Adin responded:
I made many mistakes, and I regret them. But
I regret far more all those things I never tried
out of fear of making a mistake…
Or as Les Brown put it: “Most people fail in
life not because they aim too high and miss,
but because they aim too low and hit.”
Marriage & Parenting
Consider marriage and parenting. If you
choose to remain single, you will never have
an argument in your home, never experience
strife and discord, and nobody will ever
accuse you of being “insensitive, selfish,
careless, irresponsible, narcissistic, and ‘out
for lunch.’ If you decide not to have children,
no one will accuse you of being a horrible
parent, a controlling mother, ruining the lives
of your children, crippling them emotionally,
and sending them into therapy for decades.
Yet we were created not to be perfect—angels
and souls in heaven are perfect. We were
created to jump into the circus of life, make
mistakes and learn from them, to get entangled
in the thicket of life and then come out
stronger.
But there is one condition. We need not be
perfect, but we must be accountable.
Mazal Tov
That is the reason for the strange Jewish
custom that after the breaking of the glass at
the end of the marriage ceremony, everyone
screams, “Mazal Tov!” What’s the mazal tov?
A nice glass was broken, after all.
There is a moving message here we are
conveying to the new bride. “You see your

groom? Now he’s perfect. He’s handsome,
flawless, and impeccable. He is the dream of
your life. But sooner or later, he will begin
breaking things… You know what you do
when he begins breaking things? Say Mazal
Tov! Mazal tov that I am married to a real
human being who is imperfect.
This is how Judaism understood the concept
of sin—as an opportunity for rebirth. Much of
Vayikra revolves around this theme of sin and
atonement. It is as though G-d is telling us: I
know you are human. Humans are not perfect.
I made you that way. And I love you anyway.
In fact, that’s why I love you—because you
are not perfect. I already had perfection before
I created you. What I want from creation is an
imperfect world that strives to improve, filled
with human beings that fail, get up and move
ahead. By being imperfect but persevering
nevertheless, you have fulfilled the purpose of
your creation. You have achieved the one
thing that I can’t do without you—you have
brought the perfect G-d into an imperfect
world.
Failing at our mission is itself a part of the
mission, as long as we can rise up and continue
moving, with the newly discovered wisdom
from our failures.
The Price of Leadership
“The price of greatness is responsibility,”
Winston Churchill said. We might add: The
price of leadership is sin. As long as you are
accountable, honest and ready to learn from
past errors, fear not the fact that you will
stumble.
This is the Torah’s message in Vayikra.
Leaders make mistakes. That is inevitable.
Now their job is not to run and hide; but to
face the mistakes, acknowledge them, and
bring atonement.
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what
ships are built for,” William Shedo said. Each
of us is called on to be a leader, a “Nasi,” in
our own way, a beacon of influence, an
ambassador of love, wisdom, light, and hope.
Get out of the harbor into the sea. We know
you will break a thing or two in the process.
When you do, we will scream Mazal Tov and
move on.
Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. Just make
sure two things: 1) they are new mistakes; not
the same old ones. 2) That you know how to
say I am sorry and learn from your mistakes to
create a brighter future.
A person who makes no mistakes, generally
makes nothing. Yet a person who makes
mistakes and then justifies them must resign
from every form of leadership.