Torah for Christians: Being a Servant

TORAH FOR CHRISTIANS 

SEASON FOUR EPISODE FIVE 

BEING A SERVANT 

First broadcast on July 14, 2022

 Now Moses, tending the flock of this father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, drove the flock into the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.  An angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush.  He gazed, and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed.  Moses said, “I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn’t the bush burn up?”  When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: “Moses! Moses!”  He answered, “Here I am (Hineini).                   

 Ex. 3.1-4

           When looking for lost sheep, it is best to avoid the mountaintops. You never know what you might find. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.

MUSIC

In the Bible, whenever somebody says “Hineini”, “Here I am”, awesome things happen.[1]  When Abraham said “Hineini”, God told him to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah[2].  When God called upon Isaiah to prophesy, Isaac answered “Hineini[3].”  And when God called Moses at the Burning Bush, the only response possible was, of course, “Hineini – Here I am.”

Here was this man, steeped in the ways of the Egyptian palace, tending sheep in Midian.  Moses though was comfortable in Midian; he was married to the daughter of a priest; he had a good job and had found fulfillment in his life.  He would have been content to stay there his entire life. And why not? In Egypt, there were people wanting to kill him.

A teacher of mine once taught that Moses found his calling on pinnacle of Mount Sinai simply because he stopped to look.[4]  Apparently, bushes burn all the time in the desert.  Moses stayed on the mountaintop long enough to realize that this was something different; it was a bush that kept burning. It was, to use the English translation of this passage, a “bush that was not consumed.”  He took his time to recognize the miracle.  In so doing, he became a servant of God.

We have talked a lot about servant-leadership. In this podcast, we will explore the servant aspect in greater detail. Becoming a servant must precede becoming a leader.  A servant mentality gives us the perspective and responsibility necessary to succeed and to realize our true calling.[5]

          When Moses said, “Hineini, Here I am,” he proclaimed that he was a servant of God.  We learn here that leaders must first be servants. Without a sense of service, we can easily become demagogues.  

Two examples, one positive, one negative, explain this point.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, was a great leader – but he was also a servant of God.  Dr. King couched his rhetoric in the language of the Church – which was, of course, replete with Biblical imagery.  In the final speech he gave, in Memphis, Tennessee the night before he was assassinated, Dr. King spoke of “the Mountaintop” and how he might never reach it.[6]  This was coded, metaphoric language.  Dr. King cast himself in the role of Moses, knowing that he might never achieve total victory in the battle for civil rights; he might indeed have to climb his own Mount Nebo – and allow for his successors to enter the holy land of racial equality.[7]

He could not have known that he would be murdered the next day.  But he was fully aware that, while victory would be won in time, he might not live to celebrate it.  Just as Moses yielded to Joshua when it was time to conquer the Land of Israel, so Dr. King yielded to his lieutenants when the assassin’s bullet took his life.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lived and died within the metaphorical context of the story of Moses.[8]  By so doing, he placed himself in a position of service to God.  As a servant of God, he became a leader of humanity and a role model for all who try to better the human condition.

Adolph Hitler was a leader, too.  But he served nobody but himself – and brought great destruction upon his people, my people and indeed the entire world by acting upon his hateful and racist self-serving beliefs.  Beholden to nobody, he exercised complete control over Germany.  While in the short run, Hitler restored pride in the German people and brought recovery to the German economy, he ultimately brought disaster upon them and the world.    

The difference could not be any clearer.  Dr. King was a servant of God and changed the world for the better.  Hitler was a servant unto himself and almost destroyed the world.

How then can we live our lives as servants to a Higher Power, be it called God, Jesus, Allah, Buddha or even Mother Earth?  Call it what you wish, the first step is acknowledgement that this Higher Power exists and, as we learned in the last episode, that we are put on earth for a cause greater than ourselves.  

The second step is to ground ourselves in the teachings of our respective faiths.  Jewish tradition teaches that there are 70 equally valid pathways to God; all of us can become people of faith (even faith in secularism!) just by walking one of these paths.  When we become active participants in our own spiritual journey, we enhance our positions as leader-servants. 

This is not as easy as it seems. Walking this path is critical to becoming a servant of God.  Many people discarded their religious traditions at some point in their lives – maybe even you. We might have rebelled against the authority clergy or the arcane and mysterious customs of our faith.  We might not have been raised in any faith. We might have become fascinated with secular humanism.  Often, we just don’t think about faith very much, saying that we are Christians, Muslims, or Jews only because we were born into that faith.

Our faith traditions ground us morally.  We learn why the family is sacred, why we are entitled to fair wages, why the environment is critical to all that is good in life – and so much more.  Acting as a person of faith enables us to know the difference between right and wrong, enables us to correct those wrongs and enables us to do the right thing with greater frequency.  Acting as a person of faith will make us into true servant-leaders. 

Think about a faith leader who inspires us.  It does not even have to be a person from our own faith; Hindus might admire Mother Theresa or Jews might venerate the Dalai Lama. These leaders lead from their value systems, not from expediency.  The former brings respect and success, expediency brings only contempt and ultimate ruin.

There is one final aspect to being a servant: giving back.  Whether we tithe, volunteer, do tzedakah[9] or advocate for a cause, we engage in what I call “Higher Power Work.”  This is essential, not just because all of us are obligated in our various faith systems to make the world a better place, but also because the very act of giving back acknowledges that there is a cause greater than ourselves.  As Malcolm Gladwell wrote recently, “The highest function of leadership is to set a standard of sacrifice and humility.”[10]

Moses is the prime exemplar of the servant-leader model.  When Moses saw the bush burning on the summit of Mount Sinai, little did he know that he would have a Hineini moment.  He came down the mountain a changed man, a servant-leader.  We too can become leader-servants when we climb to our mountaintops and act from a sense of moral strength.  Then, we cannot fail but become leaders.

To conclude, here are the three major principles to take from this episode.

• There is something greater than us, and we are subservient to it.
• Clarify your vision based upon the moral teachings of your faith.
• Give back

This is the perfect time to announce that we have a new website, www.torahforchristians.net, where you can access previous episodes, including transcripts, write a comment or ask a question, catch up on my Substack columns, Wednesday Torah and Bible Stories They (Never) Taught You in Religious School – or even book me as a speaker. Soon, there will also be a membership opportunity, which will entitle you to a free e-book and members-only ZOOM talks, when we can interact in real time. There’s a lot on the horizon so sign up for our mailing list and become a part of our community.

I want to thank you for listening to Torah for Christians. If you enjoyed this podcast, tell your friends, and spread the word. You are the reason for our success. And whether you identify as a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim or even as a skeptic, we are all in this together. So please remember: Hinei Mah Tov… L’hitra’ot, till we meet again. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.

[1] I am indebted to Rabbi Norman Cohen’s seminal work, Hineini in Our Lives (Jewish Lights, Woodstock, VT, 2003) as the reference text for this episode.
[2] Genesis 22.1 and Genesis 22.11, when the angel tells him to spare his son.
[3] Isaiah 6.8.
[4] Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, Honey From the Rock (Jewish Lights, Woodstock, VT, 1994), p. 48f.
[5] Covey, Stephen R.: The 8th Habit (Free Press, 2004).
[6] This speech, given on April 3, 19968 can be found in its entirety at http://www.afscme.org/about/kingspch.htm.
[7] The Biblical allusion is Deut. 34.1.
[8] Or perhaps he thought that he lived as Jesus would have commanded him.
[9] Tzedakah is the Hebrew word for righteousness, often understood as the giving of money for charity.
[10] https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/what-i-found-at-a-mennonite-wedding