Lech Lecha: Finding courage not to conform

Judaism is the countervoice in the conversation of humankind.”

Leaders lead. That does not mean they don’t follow, but what they follow is different from what most people follow. They don’t conform for the sake of conforming; they don’t do what others do merely because others are doing it. They follow an inner voice, a call; they have a vision, not of what is but of what might be. They think outside the box; they march to a different tune.

Never was this more dramatically signalled than in the first words of G-d to Abraham, the words that set Jewish history in motion: “Leave your land, your birthplace and your father’s house and go to the land that I will show you.”

I want you, says G-d to Abraham, to be different. Not for the sake of being different, but for the sake of starting something new, a religion that will not worship power and the symbols of power. I want you, said G-d, to “teach your children and your household afterward to follow the way of the L-rd by doing what is right and just.”

To be a Jew is to be willing to challenge the prevailing consensus when, as so often happens, nations slip into worshipping the old gods. 

We make a mistake when we think of idols in terms of their physical appearance — statues, figurines, icons. In that sense they belong to ancient times we have long outgrown. Instead, the right way to think of idols is in terms of what they represent. They symbolize power. That is what Ra was for the Egyptians, Baal for the Canaanites, Chemosh for the Moabites, Zeus for the Greeks, and missiles and bombs for terrorists and rogue states today.

Abraham is without doubt the most influential person who ever lived. Today he is claimed as the spiritual ancestor of 2.4 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims and 13 million Jews, more than half the people alive today. Yet he ruled no empire, commanded no great army, performed no miracles and proclaimed no prophecy. He is the supreme example in all of history of influence without power.

Why? Because he was prepared to be different. As the sages say, he was called ha-ivri, “the Hebrew,” because “all the world was on one side (be-ever echad) and he was on the other” (Genesis Rabbah 42: 8). Leadership can be lonely, yet you continue to do what you have to do because you know that the majority is not always right and conventional wisdom is not always wise. Dead fish go with the flow. Live fish swim against the current. So it is with conscience and courage. So it is with the children of Abraham. They are prepared to challenge the idols of the age.

After the Holocaust some social scientists were haunted by the question of why so many people were prepared, whether by active participation or silent consent, to go along with a regime that they knew was committing one of the great crimes against humanity.

Solomon Asch assembled a group of people, asking them to perform a series of simple cognitive tasks. They were shown two cards, one with a line on it, the other with three lines of different lengths, and asked which was the same size as the line on the first. Unbeknown to one participant, all the others had been briefed by Asch to give the right answer for the first few cards, then the wrong one for most of the rest. On a significant number of occasions, the experimental subject gave an answer he could see was the wrong — because everyone else had done so. Such is the power of the pressure to conform that it can lead us to say what we know is untrue.

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More frightening was the Stanford experiment carried out in the early 1970s by Philip Zimbardo. Participants were randomly assigned roles as guards or prisoners in a mock prison. Within days the students cast as guards were behaving abusively, some of them subjecting the “prisoners” to psychological torture. The students cast as prisoners put up with this passively, even siding with the guards against those who resisted.

The experiment was called off after six days, during which time even Zimbardo found himself drawn in to the artificial reality he had created. The pressure to conform to assigned roles is strong enough to lead people into doing what they know is wrong.

That is why Abraham, at the start of his mission, was told to leave “his land, his birthplace and his father’s house,” to free himself from the pressure to conform.

One of the great writers on leadership, Warren Bennis, writes: “By the time we reach puberty, the world has shaped us to a greater extent than we realize. Our family, friends, and society in general have told us — by word and example — how to be. But people begin to become leaders at that moment when they decide for themselves how to be.”

One reason why Jews have become, out of all proportion to their numbers, leaders in almost every sphere of human endeavor, is precisely this willingness to be different. Throughout the centuries Jews have been the most striking example of a group that refused to assimilate to the dominant culture or convert to the dominant faith.

One other finding of Solomon Asch is worth noting. If just one other person was willing to support the individual who could see that the others were giving the wrong answer, it gave him the strength to stand out against the consensus. That is why, however small their numbers, Jews created communities. It is hard to lead alone, far less hard to lead in the company of others even if you are a minority.

Judaism is the countervoice in the conversation of humankind. As Jews we do not follow the majority merely because it is the majority. In age after age, century after century, Jews were prepared to do what the poet Robert Frost immortalized in The Road Not Taken, Birches, and Other Poems:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.

It is what makes a nation of leaders.