Doubt, Empathy, and Hope: Leadership for the Israel of Tomorrow
Ronit Heyd
Ronit Heyd is Vice President and Director of the Center for Israeli & Jewish Identity at the Shalom Hartman Institute.
Protest in Tel Aviv, April 20, 2024. Credit: AP Photo, Leo Corea
On October 7, 2023, at 12:30pm, I was driving tensely down Highway 6. With me in the car were three very smelly, very muddy teenage boys—my son and two of his friends—who had just completed a mountain biking competition. Actually, they didn’t complete it. They finished all the downhill “runs,” and did all the “stages,” but without any ranking or scores, as, midway through the event, the timekeeper, a reserve pilot, had dropped his equipment and dashed to the army. In the car, the boys were only vaguely aware of what was going on. They had seen the worried faces of many parents at the competition who were whispering incredulously that friends were bidding farewell to them over WhatsApp; they felt the confused anxiety as we rushed them back to the car; but since I wanted to keep the horrors away from them—this was when I still believed I could shield my children from the most sickening truths of terror and war—I had the radio on only in my earbuds as I drove back to Jerusalem, the boys babbling in the back seat, comparing “drops” and “berms,” oblivious to the shock and disbelief I was experiencing.
Several people in the kibbutzim of the Gaza Envelope called the media in despair that morning, and they were begging, live on the radio, for the army, the police, someone to come and save them. As I listened to their anguished cries for help, a thought shot through my head: “Well, that’s it for the judiciary reform. Bygones.” This government is done. Netanyahu is over. Yariv Levin is over. They have failed us in unimaginable ways. I assumed that their immense leadership failure—and this was when the number of known casualties was still only in tens—would be a gamechanger for Israel, and it would lead, I wanted to believe, sooner rather than later, to a major shift in Israel’s direction.
Hell, was I ever wrong.
Not only did the country’s direction not change, but the disintegration of Israel’s liberal democratic character, the erosion of the fundamental values of Zionism including solidarity, moral integrity, and the aim of establishing an exceptional society based on equality and justice that had accelerated earlier that year, has continued with greater vigor under the umbrella of Israel’s right to defend itself. The war slogan, “together we will win,” has been used to distract public attention away from the undermining of democratic principles. Calls for “unity now” have masked real schisms in Israeli society, such as those around the conscription of Haredim or making a hostage deal.
This summer, a staggering 82 percent of Israelis responding to a Reichman University poll expressed distrust in the government. Among them, 75 percent indicated that the reason for their lack of trust was either corruption and the interest-driven management of government affairs, or the government’s inadequate military and legislative policies.
Toxic polarization, political practices of shaming and labeling, the manipulation of truth by politically controlled news outlets and social media have already been eroding our society for a while. This major break in Israelis’ trust of the government is not new. Heavy years of illiberal tugs and pulls at Israeli government budgets, mostly to pad Haredi and ultranationalist factions, coupled with the bulldozering efforts to pass a hyper-conservative judicial reform in 2023, have seriously undermined faith in the government.
But most importantly, weeks went by after October 7 without an adequate government response. We were left to rely solely on civil society to address the immediate needs of victims, reserve families, and displaced communities. Faith in government and Israeli political leadership plummeted even further. The failure (and some say, refusal) of formal leadership to bring about a hostage deal signaled for many Israelis that the contract between citizens and state had been broken, leaving them in a dark void of faith in current Israeli political leadership. In the words of a participant in Hazon, a Shalom Hartman Institute leadership program for young Israelis: “I used to think that there would always be someone there, a ‘responsible adult’ I could rely on, one who knows better, who will be able to make the right decisions when needed. The first weeks after October 7 made me realize there was no one. It was up to me and my friends to provide help to those in need.”
Many of us share her sentiment: the bewildering realization that there is no one in charge we can trust. How will we ever recover? When will Israelis ever again have leadership we can trust, even if we disagree with it?
Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, developers of the model of Adaptive Leadership, argue in their 2014 article, “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership,” and elsewhere, that people expect formal authority figures to provide direction, protection, and order. “Direction” denotes the vision and goals that, if pursued and fulfilled, will enable us to thrive; “protection” entails scanning for external and internal threats and mobilizing the needed response to keep us safe; and “order” means establishing group norms and orienting people to their roles and responsibilities.
When authority fails to provide these services to its people, it cannot serve anymore.
Empathy and proximity
Shortly after October 7, when senior army generals visited the family of one of the female IDF observers taken hostage from their army base, they sat in silence. “Don’t respond,” the liaison officer instructed them. “Just absorb the pain.” And that is what they did. They didn’t try to fend off the anger and accusations the shattered family members hurled at them. They just sat in silence, accepting the blame, accepting responsibility, and holding the grief.
True leadership is not just about putting forward a vision and having people follow you. It is about the ability to see people, to be with them in their pain. In 1997, King Hussein of Jordan came personally to offer his condolences to the families of seven victims, teenage girls who were shot and killed by a Jordanian soldier on Peace Island, a piece of land in the Jordan River right on the border between Israel and Jordan. King Hussein’s visit was a unique and deeply moving gesture of empathy and leadership for peace. His act of leadership was so powerful that many Israelis expressed the half-serious wish that King Hussein would also take us under his wings. Our response demonstrated a thirst for empathic leadership, one that does not justify or shed responsibility, but shows empathy by—using words from Bryan Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, Just Mercy—embracing the pain and holding it for your people.
Reframe and focus on the important
We Israelis need leadership that can draw our attention away from expendable aims and toward those that are actually important.
When David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, negotiated the reparations agreement between Israel and West Germany compensating the State of Israel for the loss of Jewish livelihood and property under Nazi persecution, he faced serious objections from Israelis on all parts of the political spectrum: accepting reparation payments, they claimed, would be the equivalent of forgiving the Nazis for their crimes. But when speaking to the Knesset in January of 1952, Ben Gurion reframed the discourse. He argued in favor of reparations as necessary “so that the murderers do not become the heirs as well.” He also reminded the public that, pragmatically, the reparation payments would finance the absorption and rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors.
This example of leadership demonstrates that it is possible to make difficult and unpopular decisions without ignoring public sentiment. Ben Gurion acknowledged the pain and the tension of the moment and presented an argument that paved a new path to making sense of a morally torn reality.
We need leaders who can guide us through this painful process today, who will build our capacity to handle the tension that is tearing us apart between our security needs and our moral commitments, who will communicate with clarity and honesty the moral challenges Israel is facing: what are the risks of a hostage deal? What moral price should we pay to protect ourselves? What losses should we be willing to accept as we move toward a better future? Israel's current leadership is instead directing all our attention to the use of force, reminding us (and our enemies, and the world) of our military power and promising it will lead us eventually to victory. Can this leadership also guide us carefully through the painful and scary process of giving up our sole reliance on military power, letting go of the belief that forever we shall live by our swords? Can it move us toward acknowledging that only compromises and negotiated agreements can promise us real security and peace?
Leadership, as Heifetz and Linsky articulate it in Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading (2002), is disappointing your people at a pace that they can tolerate. We need leaders who will disappoint us by introducing the idea that in the long run, no iron dome can protect us more than strong strategic alliances and political agreements.
Love Jewish Ideas?
Subscribe to the print edition of Sources today.
Help us see our part in the mess
I have always refused to adopt the political slogan, “Just Not Bibi.” I have never thought that Netanyahu alone was the problem, and I have refused to believe that removing him from power would solve all of Israel’s problems. Throughout years of anti-Netanyahu demonstrations after his trial for corruption, I felt both (or all) sides were falling into a wicked trap of dual victimization and extremism: those protesting vehemently against him saw themselves as the persecuted last protectors of democracy against a neo-authoritarian ruler whose solitary guiding principles and tools were deception and manipulation, while Netanyahu supporters perceived his critics as violent anarchists determined to maintain the status quo and remain the social elite. In this context, huge billboard signs portraying Netanyahu’s face with large accusing words, “You are the head, you are to blame!” may be stating an obvious truth, because, indeed, the responsibility lies with the formal authority, but such statements will not solve any of our social tensions and will not build a foundation for an Israel of tomorrow.
Instead, we should ask ourselves: what is our part in the mess? What have I or the groups I identify with done to participate in creating the deep schisms in Israeli society? What is my responsibility for fueling hatred and polarization?
At the end of August, Rabbi Sharon Brous delivered a powerful d’rasha following the brutal murder of the six hostages, Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alex Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Eden Yerushalmi. She retold the Talmudic story of Rav Tzadok, who lectured the people assembled at the Temple after one priest stabbed another one to death in their competition to reach the altar and perform terumat hadeshen, the daily removal of the ashes. Rav Tzadok lectured them about responsibility—both his responsibility and theirs—for letting a vile, antagonistic culture foment among them, making such an act of hatred and deadly violence possible (bYoma 23a). By using this story, Brous alluded to the hundreds of thousands of people, in Israel and around the world, begging the victims for forgiveness; from the closest family members of the murdered hostages to random people in the streets, holding up signs and crying: סְלִיחָה. We are sorry. We are so sorry for not saving you. We are so, so sorry for not protecting you. We are so, so, so sorry for the loss of your beautiful, innocent lives.
Leadership must build the capacity of its people. It must help them to grow, understand new perspectives, learn better ways to address complex challenges in a difficult reality, and acquire whatever tools they need. It does this by reframing conflicts as creative tensions that can be resolved by creating a more integrated whole. It must provide the language, framing, and environment in which groups, communities, and societies can grapple with harsh conditions and competing values. It must engage people in the work they need to do—the tough conversations that should be held, the confrontations and conflicts that should be recognized, the problems that should be solved in order to create progress and improvement—in a way that will push them beyond their comfort zones and toward adaptation. Leaders should not shrug off responsibility and decentralize guilt, leaving the moral wounds to be carried forward in history by everyone except them. In Israel, our leadership has not worked to build the capacity of our society’s large and diverse groups to overcome our conflicts. Instead, our leadership has been seeding despair, endlessly chipping away at our sense of efficacy, potency, and capacity to bring about change. Looking at people in the streets, mourning the loss of six more precious souls and demanding a hostage deal, I see “we failed them” written all over their faces.
Purpose, not vision
A clear vision is compelling. It provides comfort and addresses our need for certainty and closure. But a clear vision is also a closed vision, and in times of turmoil and volatility, this kind of vision can be misleading. At best, clear visions ignore value clashes that need to be addressed among factions in society; at worst, they distort reality and risk demagoguery.
In times of crisis, we need leadership with purpose rather than vision. A leader with purpose presents a personally authentic moral compass with which to navigate the messy reality of moral conflicts, examine colliding values, and recognize the losses that a process of necessary change would require. In a time like this, when the price of a hostage deal is being labeled as “too high” by one political camp, and as “vital and unquestionably necessary” by the other, true leadership should be able to communicate the price, the pros and cons, the risks and losses—material, security- related, and moral—and guide society in grappling with them.
On October 7 in Israel, our paradigms came crashing down. The term we use to describe this effect literally means “the collapse of conceptions.” When a society’s foundational ideas have been called into question in this way, it needs leadership that understands that all paradigms require constant reflection, deliberation, and change. It needs leadership that can say: I was wrong. I, we, are correcting—what Isaiah Berlin called “the courage of our admitted ignorance, of our doubts and uncertainties.” Putting aside its decisiveness and making room for not knowing is one possible way Israeli leadership could rebuild trust.
What can we do? Small steps for rebuilding norms and moral guidelines
Over this last year, in the most challenging of times, Israeli society modeled solidarity and mutual commitment, along with creativity and an impressive ability to crowdsource our logistical needs. Can this energy be translated into a form that can get us out of this leadership crisis? Small, almost minuscule acts could guide the way by setting clear norms.
On the night of the second Iranian missile attack, Eran Nissan, head of Mehazkim, one of Israel’s pro-democracy and shared society NGOs, rushed to provide emergency treatment to the wounded victims of a terrorist shooting in Jaffa. While tying a tourniquet on one of the injured young women, he realized they were still exposed to the missiles and took her with him to shelter in the stairwell of his building in his bloodstained clothes. Later that night, he was interviewed on Channel 12 for his heroism, and, as the interview was ending, he asked to add one more thing: "When I finally managed to get the blood off, I saw Itamar Ben Gvir standing here in the street, inciting against Arabs and advocating for destroying the mosque, while Jews and Arabs hide and take shelter together here in the stairwell, and the Magen David Adom volunteers who come to save them are Jews and Arabs, the doctors at the hospital are Jews and Arabs, Arabs who probably pray in this mosque. The minister of national defense who has failed in his every role and responsibility cynically uses a horrific terror attack to continue to infuse poison into the open wounds of Israeli society. The most important struggle we have in Israeli society is not Jews against Arabs but between those who believe that our future is here together, and we need to build it, and those who believe in violence and hate."
Nissan’s behavior that night implemented David Ben Gurion’s vision of Israel as “a new society built on freedom, equality, tolerance, mutual support, and love of humanity… a society with no exploitation, discrimination, enslavement, or control of man. . . . The way of the Jewish people in tikkun olam is exemplary, and through the example of its life will show the way to human redemption.” In his actions and his words, Nissan demonstrated what it might look like for us, as citizen leaders, to reshape our collective moral guidelines and create new paths for rebuilding Israel.
None of us is a superhero
The tendency to want to solve everything all at once, to come up with the right—nay, the ultimate—solution, is understandable, especially in such tense times. But superheroes exist only in fiction (or, perhaps, as we are witnessing again and again, on the battlefield, where soldiers under the harshest and most dangerous circumstances are showing out-of-this-world bravery). But in civil life, and especially when dealing with complex problems, there is no single or easy solution—or single person—that can end the war or solve our political problems.
A leadership that sees only one side of the story will not be able to move us all forward. If I advocate for a hostage deal and at the same time disregard those who are living in fear, convinced that a deal will shatter our ability to defend ourselves and bring about the annihilation of the State of Israel; or, if I advocate for peace camp while ignoring the voices of those who believe that only taking land and causing more pain to our enemies will deter them from attacking us in the future, I am not a true leader. Cultivating regional strategic alliances with the moderate axis states in the Middle East is a notion that, for many, seems crazy and improbable—as draining sodden, malaria-infested swamps to make the land suitable for crops once did. We also need leaders who know that creating a paradigm shift in Israel will take time, and that helping people reexamine their deeply held beliefs will require a sober, multiperspective approach.
The psychological need for a reliable centralized authority, one we can trust in times of turmoil, is understandable and common. Many dictators assume power in times of immense stress and take advantage of people’s need to feel protected. But I refuse to buy into the view that we are turning into a dictatorship. Israel’s vibrant civil society, its unmatched mutual commitment and solidarity, its chutzpah and prowess, are a robust antidote to any such efforts.
As Israelis, and as Jews outside of Israel, we need to embrace the notion that we are now operating on new ground. In this reality, civil society is not just a third pillar supporting and pushing back against government in a dance of checks and balances. It is the tree trunk that will enable renewed growth and will invigorate all of Israeli society. Amid a leadership crisis, from within the sad abyss created by the deep lack of faith many Israelis are experiencing, acts of leadership by citizens are the threads that will reweave our social fabric and moral foundations.
