The Aspiration Postcard
A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
Marcus Aurelius
In Hebrew, the word for transition is “maavar,” which also means “bridge.” Since Hebrew is a relatively economical language when it comes to root words, the relationship between the two words makes fine sense. A bridge is an instrument or transitional passage that connects two otherwise unconnected places, usually two bodies of land. The bridge allows for smooth passage and is also usually the most efficient way to get between two otherwise separate locations. We also use the term to indicate other objects, ideas, and people who are able to bring otherwise disparate objects or concepts together. The problem with every bridge is answering the question “where is it?” with any precision. Were you to stand in the middle of a bridge between two countries it would be difficult to determine an exact address. You would be aware that you were not in one place and not in another and that you would never have an exact address unless you picked a side. No one who sets out to cross a bridge just stays there. Such is the problem with all transitions; they require both a cognitive and an emotional understanding that the transition is not the destination. The competent leader will help motivate people to make the crossing and show people why they could or should not stay in the place they left while creating an inviting picture of the landing. No leader should sell people a bridge.
The Jewish people are called “ivri’im” – “those who crossed over,” from the same root. Abraham crossed over countries to get to Canaan. We crossed the Reed Sea and the Jordan River. We are facile at making changes and at adaptation. We understand that to be in transition is not the same as meandering aimlessly. And yet, even though we are named for our flexibility, in the wilderness we displayed a great deal of rigidity, the kind of small-mindedness that became an obstacle to getting to the other side of any dilemma.
What does a leader need to do to inspire followers who are stuck on the bridge?1Portions of this essay were excerpted from the author’s essay “Food in the Wilderness,” Le’ela, (December 2001): 3–7. Most people today would use the loose term “vision” to answer the question, actually believing that a word that is so hard to define would somehow be appealing and lofty enough to satisfy eager listeners. In actuality, the word may buy the leader more time to come up with a concrete answer. “A vision of what?” might be a more appropriate response. But vision is a popular word in leadership literature. In the index of Warren Bennis’s classic, On Becoming a Leader, the word “vision” enjoys more citations in the book than any other idea or concept. Bennis, one of the most popular thinkers today on the subject of leadership, believes that vision is the “first basic ingredient” of leadership. “The leader has a clear idea of what he or she wants to do – professionally and personally – and the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures. Unless you know where you’re going, and why, you cannot possibly get there.”2Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994), 39–40. Bennis reminds us of the wisdom attributed to Alice’s Cheshire cat, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” In this picture, without a guiding vision, leaders meander and get lost quickly.
The problem with this otherwise logical piece of advice is that leadership is rarely so linear or logical. As we established in earlier chapters, leaders meander and get lost predominantly because when they enter the messiness of leadership, all of their carefully made plans must get rethought. The path is not straight; the destination is not always realistic and the leaders may have conveniently forgotten about all the politics they would have to navigate and negotiate along the way. No one wants to stand up and say the truth: “I need to be honest with you. I actually don’t have a clear vision, but I manage well. I need to spend time here and see where I can really take this place or these people incrementally or if that is even possible. I’ll get back to you.”
No one wants to articulate the murkiness and uncertainty of what most leaders really do confront when they set out in the world as change agents. Add to this the problem of time, and the formula becomes untenable. New CEOs and executive directors inherit a long list of problems that they probably had nothing to do with yet are expected to fix while setting out a plan for the future. One leadership thinker likened it to changing a tire while driving sixty miles an hour. Volunteer leaders on nonprofit boards typically take terms for two or three years. By the time they figure out the ambiguities and the possible open doors, they are usually handing the reins over to someone else. Public officials may get a little more time, but it is rarely enough time to institute lasting change because within what seems to be the blink of an eye, they have to put aside some of the energy usually used to get things done so that they can campaign for reelection.
We want our leaders to have vision and to share it broadly with us and motivate us to join them in seeking higher ground. We want them to speak and believe that leadership is a science, even when it seems more like a combination of art and glorified babysitting. Some stubborn types do buckle down with a singular aim and pay attention to very specific objectives with laser-like focus. These leaders may get there and actualize their vision, but it often comes at the extreme cost of putting everything else that had to be done to the side. It may come without the sincere ownership or buy-in of those the leader must serve. Such leaders often get criticized for being myopic and narrow, even though they let their followers know that they did not set out to change the world, only one little sliver of it. It is no surprise that leaders, especially those in the public eye like politicians, often have their campaign goals played back to them with videotape-like accuracy when they fail to achieve their stated goals in office. “Read my lips. No more taxes.” Did we really believe that any realistic picture of a future included no more taxes? Many of us did. It was not reality speaking. It was hope talking.
Into this difficult conversation on vision enters a concept developed by Chip and Dan Heath, two brothers who coauthored the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. They believe that we should chisel away at small attainable objectives that can be tackled in months or years, rather than decades, through creating a picture of what life will look like when we achieve a particular goal or vision. Not giving people that positive portrait of the future will hamper any change effort: “We want what we might call a destination postcard – a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible.”3Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 76. When someone sends you a postcard, what they are saying, in essence, is, “Wish you were here. This is a beautiful place to me. Look at the image on the front. This is what it would look like if you could actually join me.” These future snapshots must be compelling and realistic. You couldn’t send someone a picture of Iceland covered in palm trees. No one would buy it. But you can send someone a postcard of a place at its most serene and lovely.
The Heath brothers believe that when you describe a compelling destination, you help people who are lost in analysis apply their strengths “to figuring out how to get there” [emphasis in the original]. 4Heath and Heath, Switch, 81. Energy that is used to obsess (their verb) over how to move or even if one should move is redirected to the achievement of something more specific. The leader creates that postcard picture and keeps reminding people what it looks like while pointing the way.
Moses used a type of postcard in Deuteronomy 8. There, he created a picture of what the Land of Israel would look like at its absolute material best. Rather than a destination postcard, I think of it as an aspiration postcard.
For the Lord, your God, is bringing you to a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs and pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey, a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing, a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper. When you have eaten and are satisfied, you will bless God, your God, for the good land that He has given you. (Deut. 8:7–10)
In the parched wilderness, Moses created a compelling vision of gushing rivers. In a place of topographical monotony, Moses offered the lush and variegated landscape of mountains and valleys. In a place where need was constant and distracting, Moses offered a portrait of a land that lacked nothing. At a time of discontent, when all the people could do was complain about what they did not have, Moses gave them a spiritual destination. In that place, they would finally be satisfied with what they had, and they would bless God as a result.
This destination postcard was a stretch of the imagination for the ancient Israelites. A life without complaint was nowhere tenable in their decades without life’s basic necessities ready and available. Moses understood that for a people beset by problems expressed through material need, he had to create a vision that was material in nature. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch observes that this vision was offered in Deuteronomy to set a verbal entrance into a new stage of Israelite life:
For the school of the wandering in the wilderness has come to an end. You are about to enter the future for which that whole exceptional condition on earth was to be a preparation. And now you have to prove and confirm, in a normal condition of men and nations, what you were to learn in that wonderful preparatory school, and may not unlearn it in the altered, happy conditions, if these, the happy future now beginning is to endure.5Hirsch, The Pentateuch with Translation and Commentary, 143.
For Rabbi Hirsch, the decades in the wilderness were the school to build the character of the Israelites and prepare them for a different life. Everything the Israelites experienced in the wilderness had educational value to position them to live the dream.
Moses, however, understood that these altered conditions may not have had an ameliorative effect when he continued presenting a picture of the future:
Take care lest you forget the Lord your God and fail to keep His commandments, His rules, and His laws, which I enjoin upon you today. When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and your gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Lord your God – who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage; who led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its seraph serpents and scorpions, a parched land with no water in it, who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your fathers had never known, in order to test you by hardships only to benefit you in the end – and you say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.” Remember that it is the Lord your God who gives you the power to get wealth, in fulfillment of the covenant. (Deut. 8:11–18)
The stability of a homeland may offer temporary respite from the harsh conditions of the wilderness, but it may wean the people from dependency on God because they might falsely believe that they are self-determining. When lost and unsure, they had no choice but to live with God in their midst. Even angry and bitter, enmeshed in overly sentimental portraits of life in Egypt, the Israelites were surrounded by God’s clouds of glory. In the wilderness, there was no place where life was physically satisfying, and there was no place where God was not. In the Land of Israel, Moses warned that they would be physically sated, but could create a landscape where God did not reside.
A Moveable Feast
Vision in the wilderness – that of the past, present, and future – was created largely through the mechanism of food, the language the Israelites best understood. Destination postcards looked more like the photos in cookbooks. There were foods associated with slavery in Egypt, foods associated with the wilderness experience, and foods associated with the Land of Israel – namely those mentioned above from Deuteronomy 8, as well as milk and honey. These foods were both real and also lived symbolically in their imaginations, tying them to a vision of place.
The postcard they carried of the past was a picture of Egyptian food. They dreamed of the food of Egypt, and it made them weep:
The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving, and then the Israelites wept and said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Now our gullets are shriveled. There is nothing at all! Nothing but this manna to look at!” (Num. 11:4–6)
Dangers are hidden in the foods the Israelites desired. The cravings they had for meat and fish were carnal in nature. The associations they made with the food of Egypt were representative of the sexual and sensual pleasures prevalent in Egypt in shape and pungency. Egyptian carnality is imprinted in the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, perhaps famously expressed in a debate about this very passage. Did the Israelites literally eat fish for free in Egypt, or was this a subtle, erotic reference?6Yoma 75a. Many of the legends that revolved around the manna are derived from this folio in the Talmud. Egypt, in their minds, was a place of sensual desire and satiation so different from the sparse and arid life of the wilderness. Consequently, Numbers 11 ends with the death of those who only dreamed of Egypt and forfeited the aspiration postcard of Israel. They died with quail in between their teeth, the ultimate cost of a life where meat was privileged over freedom.
Freedom would not come by looking nostalgically back at a life of oppression. And it would not be prized if the destination overly resembled the journey. If the food of the wilderness was the same as the food of Israel, and one’s most immediate needs could be provided for in situ, there would be no reason to continue. Because the Israelites were in a transitional place, they needed a transitional food. The manna, first mentioned in Exodus 16 in response to Israelite cries of hunger, must have been regarded as a divine and irresistible present, and yet it stirred controversy again and again in biblical texts. In fact, the Israelite request for bread was not met with a bread-like response. It bore the same name but was curious from the outset:
When the fall of dew lifted, there, over the surface of the wilderness, lay a fine and flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” – for they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, “That is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat.” (Ex. 16:14–15)
The way in which this bread was delivered and the way that it looked created a sense in the Israelites that this bread was not bread at all, but a food they could not name. This bread itself was in question. The question mark was not only about the food, but about the nature of the whole wilderness experience. They had no idea where they were, when they would arrive at their destination, or what the destination would offer. Life itself was a question mark.
Manna’s strange properties extended beyond this. Moses told them the amount of manna they were entitled to collect and that one person could gather it for all those in his tent. The Israelites went out; some collected much and others collected little. Unlike bread, the gathering of this new substance was urgent and immediate. It could not wait another day. “And Moses said to them, ‘Let no one leave any of it over until morning.’ But they paid no attention to Moses; some of them left it until morning, and it became infested with maggots and stank. And Moses was angry with them” (Ex. 16:19–20).
Later, the rabbis of the Talmud read much into this daily deliverance of manna as a test of faith. This food generated obedience and repentance. Knowing that their food came once a day, the Israelites had to behave daily in a way that made them worthy of its receipt. And yet before the Sabbath, they were told explicitly by Moses to collect two shares for the day to come. Having seen the maggots once, they did not trust Moses and went out to gather on the Sabbath. No manna arrived, and God became despondent and said to Moses: “How long will you men refuse to obey My commandments and My teachings?” (Ex. 16:28). This almost Pavlovian mechanism for teaching the Israelites about this new food eventually worked and came to symbolize wilderness life. To be a transitional food, the manna could not look like anything the Israelites had ever eaten. So unusual was this manna that Moses commanded Aaron to make a keepsake of it: “‘Take a jar, put one omer [biblical measurement] of manna in it, and place it before the Lord, to be kept through the ages.’ As the Lord commanded Moses, Aaron placed it before the Pact to be kept” (Ex. 16:33–34). Imagine opening a large box with an archeologist’s curiosity to find in it two tablets of stone, two broken tablets of stone, and one small jar of strange white material the Israelites called wilderness food. The text is followed by a historical observation, namely that the Israelites were sustained by this manna for forty years until they reached the border of Canaan.
The peculiarities of the manna outlined above beg the question: Why did God give them this particular food in this particular way? What underlying symbolism drove this culinary oddity? Manna was to be associated only with the wilderness trek. It appears nowhere else in the Bible and could not be replicated by human endeavors. Only in contrast to normal eating patterns does the true significance of this manna come to light. When the Israelites crossed the Jordan, the manna stopped: “The manna stopped the day after they ate this food from the land; there was no longer any manna for the Israelites, but that year they ate of the produce of Canaan” (Josh. 5:12).
In Deuteronomy, the manna is not portrayed as a food of wonder but is itself a test of faith: “He [God] subjected you to the hardship of hunger and then gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your fathers had ever known, in order to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but that man may live on anything that the Lord decrees” (Deut. 8:3). The purpose of this food was to enhance the sense of transition and to curb the human pleasure of eating for more transcendent goals; ultimately, the Israelites needed more than physical nourishment to endure. Ironically, the purpose of the manna was not so much as food, but to teach less dependence upon food. Receiving manna daily from heaven would force the Israelites to merit and deserve this gift, as the Talmud records the question of a group of students to their teacher, “Why did not the manna come down to Israel once annually?” The teacher responded with a parable:
This problem may be compared to a king of flesh and blood who had a son whom he provided with maintenance once a year, so that he would visit his father once a year only. Thereupon he provided for his maintenance every day so that he called upon him every day…. One who had four or five children would worry, saying, “Perhaps no manna will come down tomorrow, and all will die of hunger.” Thus, they were found to turn their attention to their father in heaven.7Yoma 76a. The assumption of this passage is troubling. The faith exhibited was utilitarian in nature as a means for sustaining one’s family. There was no deeper interest in faith or commitment; following rules was about putting food on the table.
The insecurity of relying daily upon another for food would make the children of Israel worthy. Thus, manna in the rabbinic mind became an instrument for teaching faith.
The Food of the Future, the Dream of the Future
Returning to the aspiration postcard of the future, Moses offered an image of food: “a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs and pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey; a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing” (Deut. 8:8). The pleasant images utilized in this verse are a far cry from pungent slave foods or from manna’s barely tolerable sameness in the complaints of the Israelites. Deuteronomy’s promise is not one of flesh, but one of agrarian riches, returning us at once to the Garden of Eden’s heady pleasures. It is not one of stinging and acrid vegetables, but of sweet and abundant fruit grown over time. The root vegetables they asked for in the middle of the wilderness were just that. They came from the ground and symbolically represented their desire to stay in one place, yet this root produce would only last them one season. After one harvest, its benefits were gone. Planting trees takes longer and requires the capacity to see what is not yet in existence. The oft-quoted and beautiful talmudic parable of a traveler and a tree comes to mind. The traveler saw an old man planting a tree that he would never live to see flourish. When the traveler questioned why he was planting, the old man responded: “I did not enter a desolate world. Just as those before me planted for me, thus will I plant for those who come after me.” 8Taanit 23a. This is the ultimate statement of stewardship: to see a future not yet visible and prepare it for others whom you will not see. The image of more stable vegetation – trees rather than root vegetables – is another important contrast that created a compelling aspiration postcard. The vision of arriving at the destination is not the only thing Deuteronomy 8 contains; it offers a future that will continue to yield bounty time and again. Patience on the part of the Israelites would solve their problems in a much more munificent way than even they had imagined. You must be patient when you plant a tree.
The text extends its rewards beyond the earth’s produce; a people who found fault with the provisions offered by their leadership at every turn are suddenly told, “you will lack nothing.”
Intertwined with this image of abundance is another bountiful promise associated with the Land of Israel: the milk and honey postcard. The contemporary Israeli botanist, Nogah Hareuveni, contends that the foods of Deuteronomy 8 are linked with the image of milk and honey mentioned in Exodus 3:8 and Deuteronomy 26:15.9Nogah Hareuveni, Nature in Our Biblical Heritage (Kiryat Ono: Neot Kedumim, 1980), 11–22. The causal relationship between the two is clear. The more vegetation was produced, the more date honey was produced. The more vegetation generally, the easier it was to graze cattle that would, in turn, produce greater quantities of milk. Thus, the promise of milk goes hand in hand with bountiful crops. The more vegetation there was in a given area, the greater the likelihood of flowers and the greater the chances of honey production. However, Hareuveni also alerts us to a more negative image of milk and honey contained in Isaiah:
Cream and honey shall everyone eat who is left in the [desolated] land. And it shall come to pass on that day that every place where there has been a thousand grapevines worth a thousand pieces of silver shall be covered with briars and thorns. (Is. 7:22–24)
Cream and honey are not only the symbols of habitation and agrarian success. Here, they are signs of desolation. Hareuveni argues that in the Pentateuch, milk and honey are images of anticipation and nurturing but, in the prophetic books, they are also symbols of wasteland. Honey is depicted in several places in the Bible as a product of uncultivated land. The promise of the Land of Israel was of uncultivated land as a gift for the Israelites to farm and work. It was a new frontier. Once the Israelites inhabited the land, the same image of uncultivated and wild tracts of space became anathema to the settled farmer as well as a warning: do not let the land that God gave you lie fallow for too long lest it be overrun by untamed vegetation and not properly settled.
In contrast, Michael Walzer, using Exodus as a backdrop for other stories of revolution, claims that milk and honey were emblematic of the material promise given to the Israelites, paired with the spiritual promise that they become “a nation of priests” (Ex. 19:6). The land will be “the opposite of Egyptian bondage: free farming instead of slave labor.”10Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 101. The only difficulty with this interpretation is that the expression “milk and honey” is also used in a rebellion against Moses to describe Egypt: “Is it a small thing that you bring us out of a land flowing with milk and honey to kill us in the wilderness?” (Num. 16:13). To this Walzer responds by explaining that Egypt and Israel were not all that different in terms of the material promises they held. The main distinction was whose material gain and whose milk and honey it was:
Egypt was, of course, a land of milk and honey, and the slaves knew that it was, even if they couldn’t or wouldn’t savor its delights. And the divine promise was shaped to their consciousness – milk and honey of their own…. The promised land repeats the affluence of the house of bondage, but this is supposed to be an affluence more widely shared than it was in Egypt, and it is supposed to be an affluence that does not corrupt. And when it isn’t shared and does corrupt, then it is time to invoke the Exodus story.11Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 40.
In the book of Deuteronomy, the blessings of food are integrally connected to the land of promise and even come with a cautionary note: “When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to the Lord your God for the good land which He has given you” (Deut. 8:10). Perhaps you will mistake the milk and honey of the place of your servitude with the milk and honey of freedom. It is easy enough to confuse the two when the struggle for freedom gets difficult. Becoming an independent landowner has its own spiritual perils, one of which is the fear that the reliance upon God as provider in the desert can turn to self-sufficiency and forgetfulness of the divine once on the land. Such is the warning offered in Deuteronomy describing God’s nurturing in the wilderness and the impending change that may take place when the desert journey is over:
He set him atop the highlands to feast on the yield of the earth; He fed him honey from the crag, and oil from the flinty rock, curd of kine and milk of flocks; with the best of lambs, and rams of Bashan, and he-goats; with the very finest wheat – and foaming grape blood was your drink. But Jeshurun grew fat and kicked – you grew fat and gross and course. He forsook the God who made him and spurned the Rock of his support. (Deut. 32:13–15)
God is depicted in this passage as producing richness from a place of emptiness, honey from a crag, oil from a rock, all to nurture the fledging people, here portrayed in the powerful singular. We are familiar with the image of water from a rock, but these by-products are richer than simple water. Nevertheless, all of this nurturing was not repaid in kind. Instead, the children of Israel were to grow fat off God’s kindness. The very image of the rock producing honey and oil is turned on its head by the passage’s end; the people spurned the Rock.
The wilderness of the ancient Israelites tells a story of change through narratives of food intertwined with narratives of leadership. The food recalled from Egyptian days was associated with slave labor, with bitterness, and often with carnality. The food of desert life was reflective of the landscape, monochromatic in color and taste and a test of faith for those who ate it. The manna was a transitional food between dependence and independence. The promises of the future evoked food of land ownership and control, of bounty and human effort. The hard work required to tame uncultivated land and to produce the olive groves and vineyards of Israel created expectation rather than frustration in the hearts of the ancient Israelites. As slaves, they were accustomed to manual labor. Their future life in the Promised Land may not have changed in terms of the physical effort required to sustain themselves, but the literal fruit of their labors could now be enjoyed in freedom. Psalm 78 includes a passage about hunger and the transition from slave to free man:
To test God was in their mind when they demanded food for themselves.
They spoke against God saying, “Can God spread a feast in the wilderness?
True, He struck the rock and waters flowed, streams gushed forth,
But can He provide bread?” (Ps. 78:18–20)
In this psalm, the image of the feast in the wilderness is not a test of God’s faith in man but of man’s faith in God’s ability to provide. The psalm offers the reader a human window to view ancient Israelite needs. In this sense, the manna was not only a test for the people. It was a test of God. God passed this test. Most of the Israelites could not because they lived with the taste of the past, handcuffed to images of bondage and bitterness that they revised in their collective imagination of Egypt.
Creating an aspiration postcard begins with finding the image that will best inspire followers to take a leap of faith in a leader. It is an image that is just as important to followers as it is to leaders. A vision must resonate not only with those who create it but with those who must actualize it. Because food was so central in the complaints of the Israelites during their wilderness journey, it was natural to focus on food as a way to shift the culture. Shifting food associations by creating a food vision of the future that resonated with the Israelites helped transport them to another place not yet seen. Some who could not let go of food images of the past died with meat in their teeth. Food, because it is so primal and urgent a need, spoke to the immediacy of Israelite experience on the one hand, but also created a different kind of yearning. The kind of food dreaming that needed to take place would not only satisfy the stomach. It sated the heart and mind of one generation who dreamed about the next. Moses understood that underneath the dreams of cucumbers and melons lay an associative world of yearnings and desires that had to be channeled and directed.
Part of the conflict stemmed from the fact that the destination postcard was so late in arriving. By the time the Israelites were “in the book of Deuteronomy,” there were far fewer of them to enjoy the portrait of a land without stint that Moses had created for them. One only wonders what the wilderness experience might have looked like had Moses offered an image of gushing water, sweet fruit trees, and hills replete with minerals at their first sign of thirst in Exodus 15. Visionary leadership involves more than creating in the present a picture of an unimaginable future. It is also about when to unleash that vision so that the dream does not seem too far away.