Jewish Leadership in Parsha Toldot

Our Executive Director, Naomi Rosenfeld, was invited this past weekend to present the opening dvar Torah at Jewish Federations of Canada – UIA’s winter in-person board meeting. The following is a transcript of what she said.  

Hello everyone, and welcome to the winter in-person board meeting of Jewish Federations of Canada – United Israel Appeal. For those of you who do not know me, my name is Naomi Rosenfeld and I am the new Executive Director of the Atlantic Jewish Council.

Alongside being the new Executive Director of the AJC, I am also a recent graduate of the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program – a graduate program at Brandeis University that trains Jewish professionals to become leaders of our non-profit organizations. It is interesting to note that the founders and funders of this program fundamentally believe that specifically Jewish leadership training will benefit those of us who have chosen this career path. The mere existence of this program begs the question: what is “Jewish Leadership”?

Of course, you can’t get a master’s degree in “Jewish Professional Leadership” without discussing this question over and over again. As a side note, if any of you ever find yourselves anxious of the fate of our community in our younger generations’ hands, I ask you to look no further than imagining a group of twenty and thirty-somethings fiercely debating what it means to be a Jewish leader. However, I thought it would be interesting now to look at the question of what it means to be a Jewish leader from the perspective of this week’s parsha: Parsha Toldot.

I can count the number of Dvar Torahs I’ve given in my life on one hand, but, it just so happens that thirteen years ago this week, I gave another Dvar Torah on Parsha Toldot – at that time, on the occasion of my bat mitzvah. Parsha Toldot centers on the relationship between Jacob and Esav: it starts with Rebecca’s infertility, goes on to describe how when she and Isaac finally conceive, the two children “struggle inside her” until Esav emerges first, eventually illustrates Esav selling his birthright to Jacob for a pot of red soup, and finally ends with the climactic story of Jacob tricking Isaac into giving him his blessing intended for Esav.

Whether it was my age or the fact that I celebrated my bat mitzvah as a part of a bnai mitzvah alongside my older brother, my original interpretation of Parsha Toldot was as a story of sibling rivalry: after all, a story of two competitive siblings where the more intellectual younger sibling is able to cunningly outsmart the more athletic older sibling is one I could certainly get behind. However, with the years that have passed since my bat mitzvah, I have begun to interpret Parsha Toldot less as a story of sibling rivalry and more as a story of Jewish Leadership: Jacob embodies many qualities that Jewish leaders should aspire to, and it is these characteristics, rather than any competitive spirit, that ultimately leads Jacob towards his path as a forefather of the Jewish people.

The first true descriptions the torah provides about these two characters is in Genesis 25: verse 27:וַיְהִי עֵשָׂו אִישׁ יֹדֵעַ צַיִד, אִישׁ שָׂדֶה; וְיַעֲקֹב אִישׁ תָּם, יֹשֵׁב אֹהָלִים. Translated, it reads “And Esav was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a quiet man, dwelling in tents.” In interpreting this verse, Rabbi David Kimhi, or RaDaK as he is better known, explains that the juxtaposition of these two character descriptions is meant to highlight one key difference: Esav, the cunning, man-of-the-field hunter is, in essence, an extrovert, while Jacob – the tent-dwelling wallflower, is in reality, an introvert.

In her revolutionary work entitled, “Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking”, Susan Cain argues that our society dramatically undervalues the leadership potential of introverts, and asserts that we are much worse off for it. As someone who identifies as an introvert myself, I can attest to the leadership disadvantages I experienced growing up in our Jewish communal institutions: it is much harder for an introvert to become a Maccabia captain at our summer camps, a madrich on our birthright trips, or even a student leader in on our Hillel Boards. However, in learning from Parsha Toldot, we must remember that as Jewish leaders, we have a specific responsibility to value and embrace the introverts among us, challenging ourselves to seek leadership of, and listen to, even the quietest voices around our boardroom tables, and in our communities.

Next, let’s take a closer look at that whole soup incident. The Torah outlines how Jacob is just finishing making some soup when Esav comes in exhausted from hunting in the fields and begs Jacob for some of his “very red soup” or in Hebrew “הָאָדֹם הָאָדֹם הַזֶּה”. Jacob offers Esav some soup, under the condition that his hand over his birthright as payment. Now, even as a 12-year-old, I remember finding it strange that the Torah – which is not known in the best of times for its verbiage – goes into such specific detail about the colour of the soup. In fact, directly after Esav describes the soup in this manner, the Torah says “עַל-כֵּן קָרָא-שְׁמוֹ, אֱדוֹם” in English “Therefore, was his name called Edom”. In other words, Esav asks for some “very red soup”, and he therefore immediately acquires the nickname “Mr. Red” in perpetuity.

In interpreting this quirk in the Torah, the Ramban, or Nachmanides, argues that the colour of Jacob’s soup is not actually relevant to the story. Instead, the Torah emphasizes this detail in an attempt to communicate and emphasize an important element of Esav’s character: that he is completely absorbed by the material world. So absorbed, that he is willing to sell his entire birthright for a bowl of soup.

Many of us come here today in the final stretches of campaign: focusing on receiving every last gift and emphasizing the importance of our mission to every last donor. While financial solvency is no doubt a vitally important component of our work – in order to truly embody the qualities of Jewish leadership we learn from Parsha Toldot, we must not let this home stretch of campaign become all-consuming, we must never sell-out our mission, our birthright, for the next big gift, our metaphorical bowl of very red soup.

And finally, let’s circle back to the characteristic of Jacob with which I most identified as a bat mitzvah, and that with which I still identify most today: his youthfulness. I stand before you today, the youngest person in this room by at least ten years. Now, I’ll be honest: I spent the first three months of this position dodging any question related to my age at all costs. I remember being asked on my first day of work if I knew a community member’s son who had also spent time at Camp Kadimah. “When was he there?” I asked. “1981-1987” my community member answered. Not wanting to lie to my community member, yet not wanting to reveal my age either, I blurted out: “ooooo, I just missed him!” I replied, when, of course, I had not even been born during his son’s time at camp.

However, over time – and in large part due to the fact that I goofed and accidentally revealed my age to a local reporter who of course chose to include this information subtly by basing the entire headline of the article around it – I have slowly begun to see my age not as a source of weakness, but rather as an element of my leadership potential. My youth has allowed me to begin engaging an entirely new cohort of young Jewish leaders in Atlantic Canada and – as was the case with Jacob – my youth has given me a perspective different from many of my colleagues and lay leaders.

Now, while I am not saying that you should immediately clean house of anyone over the age of thirty, there is something to be said for taking a chance on today’s Jewish youth – hire a younger staff member for a big position, invite a younger, less financially-secure lay leader to join your board. Even if this choice seems unorthodox – or as was the case with Jacob’s leadership – does not follow the prescribed, traditional, order of selecting leadership normally followed by your Federation, we see from Parsha Toldot that taking a chance on youth today can pay-off big time in the future.

In closing, while it may not be as exciting as reading Parsha Toldot as the epic clash between siblings I once imagined as a pre-teen some – admittedly not many – years ago, we can all learn many lessons about Jewish leadership from the early years of Jacob and Esav. And, as room full of Jewish leaders – such an examination is especially vital. For, we are not Jewish leaders because we lead Jewish organizations, nor are we Jewish leaders because we do things like start board meetings with a dvar Torah. In reality, we are Jewish leaders because we understand our responsibility to lead in a uniquely Jewish way – a path illustrated for us in the juxtaposition of Jacob and Esav. Shavuah Tov.