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. Really, is this shown in a more powerful light than in

Vyadchanan? 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 Vaed 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. There had no military advantages over the nations they'd have to fight.

Ten of the twelve spies had argued almost 40 years before that the mission was impossible. In a world

of empires, nations and fortified cities, the Israelites must have seemed to the untutored eye,

defenseless, unproven, one more horde among the many who swept across Asia and Africa in ancient times.

Other than their religious practices, few contemporary observers would have seen anything about them

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