Winston Churchill. Margaret Thatcher. Menachem Begin. C.S. Lewis. The Lubavitcher Rebbe. It wasn’t that long ago that we were blessed with political and spiritual leaders who were indisputably great men and women – leaders who stood up in the face of great evil and led their people to victory.
Today? I think most of us would agree that the politicians, pastors and rabbis of our generation are not, overall, of quite the same caliber. As our civilization totters on the brink, caught between Islamic jihadists and anti-God leftists, we yearn for leaders who can lead us to victory. But they are nowhere to be found.
Why has God left us bereft of great leaders precisely at a time in history when we need them most?
“And the Lord said to Moses: “Go, descend, for your people that you have brought up from the land of Egypt have acted corruptly.” (Exodus 32:7). God’s command to Moses is strange. First God tells Moses to “go,” and then God tells Moses to “descend.” Why are both of these commands necessary?
The sages explain that with the word “go,” God simply instructed Moses to go back to the people to stop them from their sin with the golden calf. But the word “descend” has a deeper meaning: “God said to Moses: “Descend from your greatness! Your people have sinned, and so you must leave your lofty spiritual state and lower yourself to their level.”
Why did God react to the people’s sin with the golden calf by commanding Moses to spiritually lower himself to their level?
The sin of the golden calf was not a rejection of God. Rather, it was a result of the people’s obsession with and deification of Moses. When Moses left them to be with God on top of Mount Sinai for forty days, the people panicked:
Instead of trusting in God, the people put their trust in their great leader Moses, whom they treated as a god. It was specifically Moses’ awesome greatness in comparison to the rest of the nation that led them to sin with the golden calf! And so God said to Moses: “Descend from your greatness. The people must be weaned off of their trust in human leaders and learn to place their trust in Me.”
We tend to place our hopes in man, in great people. We can’t see God, so we make people into gods. “If only we had a leader like Churchill today, he would solve all our problems.” But as we draw closer to the final redemption, God has purposefully left us with flawed and imperfect leaders to force us to turn directly to Him.
This absence of exceptional leadership isn’t a cause for despair; rather, it’s a sign that redemption is drawing near. God wants us to learn to trust in Him, not in man. By removing the crutch of charismatic human leaders, He’s teaching us to stand on our own spiritual feet and develop a direct, personal relationship with Him.
It’s natural to yearn for the great leaders of the past, but their absence is part of God’s plan. As we approach the final redemption, God is gradually removing the barriers between Himself and His people, calling us to place our trust in Him and Him alone.
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