Podcast Episode 150

How can an innovative exploration of Moses’ biblical narrative offer a more generous leadership model for today’s religious leaders? In this episode, Kathleen McShane and Elan Babchuck, authors of Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire, ask how God is calling you to a leadership model in which power is shared so that power multiplies, and people are connected to God and each other.

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How can an innovative exploration of Moses’ biblical narrative offer a more generous leadership model for today’s religious leaders? In this episode, Kathleen McShane and Elan Babchuck, authors of Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire, ask how God is calling you to a leadership model in which power is shared so that power multiplies, and people are connected to God and each other.

Doug Powe: Welcome to Leading Ideas Talks, a podcast featuring thought leaders and innovative practitioners. I am Douglas Powe, the director of the Lewis Center and your host for this talk. Joining me is Reverend Kathi McShane, co-founder of Changemakers Initiative and the director of Learning and Innovation of Texas Methodist Foundation and Wesleyan Impact Partners. And Rabbi Elan Babchuck, who is the executive vice president at CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. They are the authors of Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire. This is a wonderful book, and our focus for this talk is on leadership. I am excited to have both of you and love reading the book.

Kathi McShane: Thanks, Doug. It’s so good to be here with you.

Doug Powe: I want to jump into the book, and let me begin with the really easy, obvious question: Why Moses?

Rabbi Elan Babchuck: You know, in today’s lexicon of leadership, we tend to use terms like brave leadership, visionary leadership. We often talk about charismatic leadership, as well. We certainly revere it. We lionize those models of leadership, many of which come, Kathi, no offense, from Silicon Valley, right? This, the myth of the garage; “I’m the one who figured it out.” And it’s really damaging. I think it is really deeply damaging to the people who don’t see themselves in that model, to others who don’t even want to see themselves in that model. “Gosh, I’m a generous person. I’m a collaborative person. I like being with others. I’m a community organizer by nature. I like to be curious instead of certain. I like to be generous instead of hoarding.” Whoever it is that don’t see themselves in that model, this book’s for you. And, if you do see yourselves in that “I’m the charismatic person. I alone can fix it. I love sitting at the top of the pyramid, even though it’s challenging sometimes; especially when the world feels very volatile and topsy turvy,” you know—it’s for you too, right?

So, why Moses? Because universally, we have looked at Moses for thousands of years through the lens of, in Jewish tradition, we say: “Lokam be Yisrael kemoshe’od.” There has never been a prophet like Moses that has come up. He was one of one. And our argument is, and the reason why we picked him, was in some ways we wanted to actually deconstruct that myth. So much of the mythology about Moses’s impenetrable leadership came after Moses’s death, came after the Bible, right? It was the later commentaries that looked back on him and made up these, and sort of embellished his resume, right? After the fact. And I think there’s certainly a place and a time where that can be healthy to revise history so that we have a cleaner narrative, right? We do that all the time. But I also think that clinging to that clean version of the narrative about Moses, the infallible leader; the one who was born a leader, died a leader, and led perfectly— that narrative is actually doing a lot of damage.

Kathi McShane: I’ll just add to that, that one day while we were working on the Changemaker stuff together, Elan said something about Moses really not having become his full self as a leader until his very last sermon, while they were at the edge of the promise land. And when he said to the people, “you choose: life or death.” And it was really at that moment that his leadership became full and perhaps even all that God hoped it might be. And a light bulb went off for me then; that was so … it was so personal for me to hear Elon say that. I was at what I thought was the end of my career in pastoral ministry, and I realized in the course of doing the Changemaker work that I had most of my years of leadership been leading differently than the way I was learning to lead now. I had led in a way that I was the visionary. I was supposed to have all the good ideas … I could lead everyone else because I could do their jobs better than anybody else. I could do all the jobs, and it served me well. But what I was learning in the Changemaker work was that my job was to invite and empower everyone in the organization to participate in leadership with less focus on me at the top of the pyramid.

And suddenly, Moses’s whole story sort of became this sort of treasure for us to look at. Like, how did Moses get from that kind of leader, who sat at the feet of Pharaoh to learn how to be a leader, from there to the point where he’d said to the people, “I’m not in charge of you anymore. I won’t be, you choose.” And that’s when they grew into the fullness of the people, being the people of God, the people of Israel. So, that whole story of the Exodus and the little vignettes that we pulled out to say these are the moments when Moses was learning those important lessons—that became really the frame for the book.

Doug Powe: Yeah, I appreciate the answer and in particular, the sort of way it interrelates to your personal stories. Let me push both of you a little bit, quickly, to think about one of the challenges, I think, in the church is church individuals often amazingly can have wonderful, important jobs in the secular world. But when they get into church, they really are looking for “the pastor to be the visionary,” to be the very myth you’re fighting against: against Moses. So, how do you—so it’s a culture change not just sort of for the pastor but also for those in the church—so, how do you all sort of help congregations think about this differently?

Rabbi Elan Babchuck: That’s a great question. Look, I think there are some congregations where they are really designed as a spectator sport and that’s okay, right? That’s okay. But if we are going to live into that model, the spectator spor