My sermon about Bobby Kennedy
Leadership, Moses and RFK
June 9, 2018
The result of the surveillance mission of the twelve spies to the land of Israel is disastrous. Overcome with anxiety because of the negative report they have just heard about the land they are about to enter, the people panic. Chaos breaks out and disunity prevails. The people question the purpose of their mission and want to abandon the journey to the Promised Land. They lash out against their leaders, Moses and Aaron, and question if they would not have been better off had they stayed behind as slaves and never left Egypt, and begin to prepare to turn back.
Literally and figuratively, the Israelites are in the wilderness.
God and Moses are both frustrated with the rebellious, impudent and ungrateful Israelites. God wants to wipe out the people and start all over again, just with Moses. Yet despite his despair, despite the outpouring against him, and challenge to everything he has done, and all that he stands for and represents, Moses refuses to give up on his people. He rises above all that to steadfastly defend his people and appeal to God not to destroy them. At a time when God is prepared to destroy the people, it is Moses who reminds God of the Lord’s compassion and inclination towards mercy and forgiveness. It is Moses who tells God that it won’t look good for Him to have brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and then kill them in the wilderness.
God relents and is convinced by Moses’ plea. He tells Moses words we recite every Yom Kippur, every Day of Atonement to this very day, “Slachti k’deverecha: I forgive, as you have spoken.”
It is one of Moses’ finest hours. He ignored the disparaging attitude of the people towards him. He did not allow the murmurings, rebellion and challenge to his leadership to get to him. He set aside his own personal feelings, and passionately defended his people to God.
From Moses, and from this very episode of how he responded to what happened after the spies came back with an unanticipated negative report and stirred the people against him, we can learn a great deal about leadership. One of the first essential qualities of leadership which is displayed by Moses and that motivates him to act as he does is to love the people he serves, to be their most passionate defender. Moses shows that such loyalty and devotion leads to placing the needs and interests of the people you serve above your own personal feelings, interests and ego.
The role of the leader is to instill in the people confidence and a sense of purpose, to help them see that their mission is noble and worthy, and that the goal is attainable, within reach, even if it will take forty years, an entire generation to achieve it. Rosabeth Moss Kanter of the Harvard Business School writes in her book, Confidence, “Leadership is not about the leader, it is about how he or she builds the confidence of everyone else.”
In many respects, the way Moses handles the situation is one of his finest hours. Leadership entails rising to the occasion. Winston Churchill is remembered for being able to rally his people and his ability to instill confidence in England at a time when the Germans were bombing its cities and countryside.
Fifty years ago this week, we lost a leader who inspired a generation and who had an unusual ability to bring together people from disparate walks of life and instill in them a sense of confidence in themselves.
1968 was a time of tremendous turmoil, great division and divisiveness, and the nation was fractured, with factions pitted against each other. But there was a leader who helped people who often saw each other as competitors for the same slice of the pie to see beyond their own special interests. He had the unique ability to unite and uplift all those he touched and helped disparate groups see that a rising tide lifts all boats.
The person who helped us see this, and who instilled a sense of hope, optimism, idealism and confidence, who was killed fifty years ago this week was Bobby Kennedy, a leader I have always admired.
The one and only time I met Bobby Kennedy, was when I attended the inauguration of President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. After the swearing in ceremony and inaugural address, my parents and I wandered through the relatively abandoned and empty Senate office building, and came upon the office of Senator Teddy Kennedy. As we were admiring and looking at the photos on the wall in the empty office, we turned as we heard some voices and then saw the two brothers enter the office. Even though I was just a kid, I still recall all these years later, how melancholy and sad the two men appeared. My mother said to me, “After all, this should have been the inauguration of the second term of their brother.”
At a time when our nation was deeply divided over the war, race, poverty and a myriad of other issues, and when it seemed as if the generational divide was greater than ever, Bobby Kennedy when he ran for president and spoke around the country brought together groups who were in conflict with each other in a way that few since have been able to do.
When he spoke at a university about the need to help the less fortunate he was challenged and asked by a medical student who would pay for better medical care for the poor? Without a moment’s hesitation he said to the college students who soon would be earning decent incomes, “You will.” His honest and courageous response did not cause resentment.
When he saw poverty – among urban poor and rural white Appalachia he felt compelled to try to do something to alleviate the suffering and to help us all understand our common shared responsibility as a nation and society for us to work together to improve the lot of all.
At a speech at the University of Cape Town in South Africa after his brother’s assassination he spoke against apartheid and said, “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
In June of 1948, twenty years before he was killed by Sirhan Sirhan, in what should be recognized as the first act of Arab terrorism in the United States, Kennedy travelled to the newly established nation of Israel and sent back dispatches to the Boston Post about the situation in Palestine.
He wrote, “The Jewish people in Palestine who believe in and who have been working toward this national state have become an immensely proud and determined people. It is already a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation with the primary ingredients of dignity and self-respect.”
He commented that the Arabs, “are willing to let the Jews remain as peaceful citizens subject to the rule of the Arab majority just as the Arabs are doing in such great number in Egypt and the Levant states, but they are determined that a separate Jewish state will be attacked and attacked until it is finally cut out like an unhealthy abscess.”
In an observation that could describe today’s Startup Nation he wrote about the Jews that, “they set up laboratories where world-famous scientists could study and analyze soils and crops. The combination of arduous labor and almost unlimited funds from the United States changed what was once arid desert into flourishing orange groves. Soils had to be washed of salt, day after day, year after year, before crops could be planted. One can see this work going on in lesser or more advanced stages wherever there are Jewish settlements in Palestine. From a small village of a few thousand inhabitants, Tel Aviv has grown into a most impressive modern metropolis of over 200,000. They have truly done much with what all agree was very little.”
Another excerpt reads, “The Jews point with pride to the fact that over 500,000 Arabs in the 12 years between 1932 and 1944, came into Palestine to take advantage of living conditions existing in no other Arab state. This is the only country in the Near and Middle East where an Arab middle class is in existence. The Jews feel that promise after promise to them has been broken.”
We should not forget that this man, who had so much potential, who could have been president, who might have been a great president, who was the moral conscience of our nation and of the Democratic party, was shot one year after the Six Day War. As his daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said in a recent interview with Israeli television, he was killed because of his love of Israel.
I loved him not just because of that, but because of the hope he instilled in all of us, of the idealism which seemed to come to an end with his assassination and of the way he truly brought us together. It was a true mark of leadership, courage and vision. He embodied one of my favorite verses from the Book of Proverbs, “In a place where there is no vision, the people perish.”
As his brother Teddy Kennedy said at his funeral, “…As my brother said in many parts of this great land, to those he touched, and to those who sought to touch him, ‘Some men see things as they are, and say – why? I dream things that never were, and say – why not?’”
