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Leaders should never stop learning. That is how they grow and teach others to grow with them.”. Learning and Leadership (Shoftim, Lessons in Leadership, Covenant & Conversation) SHARE. < Back to Quotes. ”Though few of us are destined to be Kings, Presidents or Prime Ministers, there is a general principle at stake. Leaders learn.
They must always prefer the peaceful solution to the one that involves taking a stick and hitting people on the head, even though they are prepared to do so if there is no alternative. Leaders must be capable of more than one style of leadership.” Consensus vs. Command? (Vayelech, Lessons in Leadership, Covenant & Conversation)
He often said that: ‘good leaders create followers, great leaders create leaders.’. 8) Every moment is an opportunity for leadership. Rabbi Sacks argued that ‘we are all called on to be leaders within our sphere of influence, be it the family, the community, at work, among colleagues, or in play among teammates.’.
- The Power of Empathy
- Power vs. Influence
- Passing on Values
- Gratitude (Paraphrased by Dr. Noam Weissman)
- Listening
- On The Song “Dayenu”
- Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism
- Making Space For Difference
- The Gift of Storytelling
- Israel/Zionism
Rabbi Sacks told a story about the power of empathy: “William Ury, founder of the Harvard Program of Negotiation, tells a marvellous story in one of his books. A young American, living in Japan to study aikido, was sitting one afternoon in a train in the suburbs of Tokyo. The carriage was half empty. There were some mothers with children, and elder...
“Not all of us have power, but we all have influence. That is why we can each be leaders. The most important forms of leadership come not with position, title or robes of office, not with prestige and power, but with the willingness to work with others to achieve what we cannot do alone… Always choose influence rather than power. It helps change pe...
Rabbi Sacks was a strong proponent of education and ensuring that Jewish ideals are passed on to the next generation: “You achieve immortality not by building pyramids or statues, but by engraving your values on the hearts of your children, and they on theirs, so that our ancestors live on in us and we in our children, and so on until the end of ti...
“Here’s a teaching by Rabbi Sacks I’ve repeated at least 100 times in my career as a Jewish educator. During the repetition of the Amidah (the central Standing Prayer), when there is typically passiveness throughout, when we sit and say “amen” to each blessing, there is only one blessing in which the rabbis declare the passivity to be insufficient....
Rabbi Sacks considered listening not only a religious virtue, but a key leadership skill: “Listening is a profound affirmation of the humanity of the other. In the encounter at the burning bush, when God summoned Moses to be a leader, Moses replied, ‘I am not a man of words, not yesterday, not the day before, not from the first time You spoke to yo...
“This song is a tikkun, a making-right, for the ingratitude of the Israelites in the wilderness. At almost every stage of the way, they complained: about the water, the food, the difficulties of the journey, the challenge of conquering the land. It is as if the poet were saying: ‘Where they complained, let us give thanks. Each stage was a miracle. ...
Rabbi Sacks explored the connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism in this video: “Antisemitism is a virus that mutates so that new antisemites can deny that they’re antisemites at all because their hate is different from the old. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were ...
“The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, ideal, are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.”
Rabbi Sacks taught that the Jewish people are commanded to be a “nation of storytellers”: “The greatest gift we can give our children is not money or possessions, but a story – a real story, not a fantasy, one that connects them to us and to a rich heritage of high ideals… We are heirs to a story that inspired a hundred generations of our ancestors...
“When we consider above all that God has led us ‘upright to our land,’ that there is a Medinat Yisrael[State of Israel] that finally, after the longest exile ever endured by a people, we have a country we can call home, then if we are honest, we know that we have in our time what our grandparents and their grandparents dreamed of, prayed for, but n...
- On how to educate a child: “Education means teaching a child to be curious, to wonder, to reflect, to enquire. The child who asks becomes a partner in the learning process, an active recipient.
- On the role of a teacher: “Teachers open our eyes to the world. They give us curiosity and confidence. They teach us to ask questions. They connect us to our past and future.
- On the importance of schools: “I received an invitation to lunch with the Prime Minister. At the same time I received an invitation to take part in the opening ceremony of a new Jewish school in London.
- On Jewish education: “To defend a country, you need an army. But to defend an identity, you need a school. Judaism is the religion of the book, not the sword.”
Eliezer is Abraham’s servant, not his heir. Joseph is Jacob’s son, not an Egyptian of loose morals. Moses is a prophet, not a priest. To say yes to who we are, we have to have the courage to say no to who we are not. Pain”. ― Jonathan Sacks, Lessons in Leadership: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible.
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An earlier version of this website was dedicated in the memory of Brian Roden, Shmuel ben Benjamin HaCohen z”l. The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Trust is a charity registered in the UK, charity number 1152781.
