It was a team effort. Everyone was locked in. Each leader credited someone other than himself. And somehow, we the fans did not just know it, we felt it. The circle was wide; it was held tight and yet it fit everyone in. The Eagles’ championship victory was not only domination on the field, but it was also transcendent joy around the region.
Even without Superbowl LIX, I would have been thinking about what kind of leadership gets us to that kind of place. The Jewish liturgical cycle has us reading the Exodus story and the climactic receiving of the Law at Mt. Sinai. In addition, my colleagues and I gathered to think through our roles as leaders given what feels like a years-long bombardment of unprecedented challenges for working with college students.
In that Jewish context, my colleague Rabbi Ari Weiss offered two typologies of leadership from the Biblical text: Moses as a social justice warrior and Aaron as a conciliatory peacemaker. I am exaggerating a bit. Rabbi Weiss’s point was that each had merit and faults. Moses stopped an Egyptian taskmaster from beating a Hebrew slave, but he also killed the Egyptian. Aaron was known for getting folks to reconcile and that instinct likely led to him building the Golden Calf. When we think about how to show up as leaders, sometimes we want to be dramatic change agents and sometimes we decide to take an incrementalist, compromise approach.
As a rabbi who sees my role predominantly as an educator, I have trouble choosing between these two types. I wondered if there was a third type I could latch onto. The ancient Rabbi Yosi bar Yehuda said, “When Israel came out of Egypt, three good leaders were appointed for them. These were Moses, Aaron, and Miriam” (Tosefta Sotah 11:4), so I looked into Miriam and her leadership.
Traditionally, Miriam is seen as a prophet like her brothers and, in particular, a resource provider. She is famous for knowing where to find well water in the wilderness. She is also known for getting her mother to be the nursemaid to Moses in Pharaoh’s household. Though interpretations differ, her role as a giver may have contributed to her contracting leprosy from those for whom she cared.
Then I stumbled on a different read of Miriam that I think her brothers dabbled in for an even deeper impact. Aviva Zornberg writes in her book Particulars of Rapture that “Miriam leads the women in such a circle dance,” where “the circle expresses the eschatological future, where we all see God’s light equally” (230). It is this leveling of hierarchical relation that allows her song to be in the present, while Moses sings of the future. Zornberg goes on to say that the circle dance “transcend[s] this-worldly polarities: male and female, giver and receiver…birth and death.”
I hoped to find a model of leadership that avoided the Moses-Aaron polarity, I did not expect one to transcend it. After all, Moses does delegate responsibilities in shared leadership just before going up Mt. Sinai. Aaron will work together with his sons to consecrate and to preside over the Tent of Meeting. The three siblings learn the benefit of working together with each other and with others. And yet, Miriam can be read to have leveled leadership in a way that draws down God’s light rather than have us struggle to raise ourselves up to it. I aspire to level my leadership into a circle dance like that. I kind of believe the Eagles’ emphasis on their O-line and D-line made a circle that allowed the team to fly. Let’s follow the example. Go, Birds!
About Rabbi Jeremy Winaker
Rabbi Jeremy Winaker is the executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Hillel Network, responsible for West Chester University, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and other area colleges. He is the former head of school at the Albert Einstein Academy in Wilmington and was the senior Jewish educator at the Kristol Hillel Center at the University of Delaware for four years. Rabbi Winaker lives in Delaware with his wife and three children.
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