Hello and welcome to another episode of Covenant and Conversation with me, Rabbi Sachs.

In each new episode, we'll explore a Jewish idea from the Hebrew Bible based on the terror reading of the week.

Howard Gardner, Professor of Education and Psychology at Harvard University, is one of the

great minds of our time, best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, but also he's written many

books on leadership and creativity, including one in particular leading minds that's important

in understanding this week's parisher. Gardner's argument is that what makes a leader

is the ability to tell a particular kind of story,

one that explains ourselves to ourselves and gives power and resonance to a collective vision.

So Churchill told the story of Britain's indomitable courage in the fight for freedom.

Gandhi spoke about the dignity of India and non-violent protest. Margaret

Thatcher talked about the importance of the individual against an ever-encroaching state,

and Martin Luther King told of how a great nation is colour-blind. Stories give the group a shared,

identity and sense of purpose. The great questions, who are we? Why are we here? What is our task? A best answered by telling her story.

As Barbara Hardy put it, we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe,

doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative. This is

fundamental to understanding, incidentally, why the terror is the kind of book it is. It isn't a

theological treatise or a metaphysical system,

but a series of stories extended over time from Abraham and Sarah's journey, from Mesopotamia,

to Moses and the Israelites wandering in the desert. Judaism is less about truth as a system

than about truth as story, and we are part of that story.

That's what it is to be a Jew. A large part of what Moses is doing in the book of DeVarim is retelling

that story to the next generation, reminding them of what God had done for their parents

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