The Power of Why.

In a much-watched TED Talk, Simon Sinek asked the question,

how do great leaders inspire action?

What made people like Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs stand out from their contemporaries

who may have been no less gifted, no less qualified?

His answer is this.

Most people talk about what.

Some people talk about how. Great leaders, though,

start with why. This is what makes them transformative. Sinex lecture was about business and political

leadership. The most powerful examples, though, are directly or indirectly religious. Indeed, I argued in the great partnership that what makes Abrahamic monotheism different

is that it believes that there is an answer to the question why.

Neither the universe nor human life is meaningless and accident a mere happenstance.

As Freud, Einstein and Wittgenstein all said,

religious faith is faith in the meaningfulness of life. Rarely is this shown in a more powerful

light than in Vyad Khanan. There is much in Judaism about what, what's permitted, what's forbidden, what's sacred, what's secular.

There's much too about how, how to learn, how to pray, how to grow in our relationship with God and with other people.

But there's relatively little about why.

In Vaid Khanan, Moses says some of the most inspiring words ever uttered about the why of Jewish

existence. That's what made him the great transformational leader he was, and it has consequences

for us here now. To have a sense of how strange Moses' words were, we must recall several facts.

The Israelites were still in the desert. They hadn't yet entered the land.

They had no military advantages over the nations they'd have to fight.

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