Joseph: Manager or Leader?

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Vayigash (Genesis 44:18)

In the years ahead, each of us will be called upon to make difficult leadership decisions. As part of our jobs, we’ll face complicated situations that will try our ability to balance conflicting constituencies.

Will we cancel synagogue trips to Israel when the going gets rough? How often will we travel away from our congregants in order to engage in activities that solely benefit our own careers? How much of our tzedakah funds will we provide to needy people of other faiths? Will we dutifully follow the policies and practices of our head Rabbi if they’re not in the best interest of the community?

These and other decisions—some easy, some not—will be part of our lives as religious professionals. Who will we look to for guidance on these issues? What role models will we use to help us shape our own leadership values?

An obvious place to look for leadership models is in the Bible, where leaders pour from the pages, such as Moshe, Devorah, Avraham, and so on. We can learn much on how to lead from their example.

Many people look to Joseph as an archetype for great leadership. He is one of the most successful leaders in Torah. He is unquestionably smart, quick on his feet, and a hard worker, and he has demonstrated at least some degree of sexual restraint. Looking at this week’s portion, Vayigash, however, we see some management choices he makes that should lead us to question his capacity for moral leadership. I think we should look long and hard at Joseph’s leadership values before holding him up as a leader to emulate.

For me, Joseph was a highly efficient administrator, but one who was dedicated more to his position than his people. At the end of the day, Joseph proved to be a resourceful manager when the times called for a leader.

The difference between the two, at least how I see it, is as follows:

Managers serve policies, practices, institutions and superiors; Leaders serve people.

As future Rabbis, Cantors and Educators, we will need to become managers, it’s part of our job description, but our communities need leaders as well. We need managers to organize, systematize, standardize, and “dot the i’s,” but we need leaders as well. We need leaders who dive head first into authentic tikkun olam, who take risks with in-reach and outreach, who attempt vital liturgical innovations. We certainly need managers to care for our institutions and our traditions, but we also urgently need leaders to care for our people.

Let’s look at Joseph’s action in Vayigash, particularly in chapter 47, and determine whether Joseph was a manager or a leader, and why it matters.

To review, Joseph anticipated an unusual 14 years, and he stored food for the first seven years of abundance. Once the famine began, Joseph took all of the money to be found from the Egyptians as payment for their rations. When the Egyptians ran out of rations, they begged for more food and Joseph said he would be willing to take their livestock, since they had no more money. The people thanked Joseph and traded in all that they had. The following year, when their rations were depleted, they again begged for food, but now, they were out of money and out of livestock. Due to their desperate situation, they offered: “Otanu va ad-mat-nu—our persons and our land. The people willingly gave up their land and made themselves Avadeem, serfs, for Pharaoh.

In this manner, Joseph acquired all of the farmland and persons of Egypt for Pharoah, and he removed the population, except for the pagan priests, who were Pharoah’s favorites. Joseph then gave the people seed to harvest, and told them that they would only need to give 1/5^th of their harvest to Pharaoh, which Plaut and others suggest was fair for the time.

Let’s dissect these actions into three steps to analyze:

1) Joseph bought ad stored all the available food during the years of plenty.

2) During the famine, Joseph rationed out food for the people, first for money, then for livestock.

3) When the money and livestock ran out, he sold the people their rations for their land and their freedom.

Ok, step one: buying food and reselling it as rations.

Rambam tells us that through Joseph’s management, rationing actually began during the years of plenty so as to conserve the produce of those years. Rambam also teaches us that Joseph may have purchased the foodstuffs at the lowest market price available. This is an early indication of the market economy society in which we live, in which surplus often brings down prices.

As a manager, Joseph proves very successful here—he created a centralized, controlled storage solution and acquired the needed food to last through the famine at the lowest possible cost. His boss Pharaoh must have been thrilled.

As a leader of people, however, he failed. Rather than teaching the people how to store their own food for the famine, he centralized the function. The Bible doesn’t tell us if Joseph even told the people that there would be a famine. This is a manager being expeditious in problem solving, not a leader empowering his people to improve their condition.

For a leader interested in empowering the people we’d have to wait for Moshe. When Moshe’s people were starving and Manna was provided by God, Moshe didn’t create a bureaucracy to horde it and dole it out, but he taught the people how to collect and store their own manna. He didn’t store extra for Shabbat when there would be no Manna, but he told the people how they should do just that. He empowered his people to improve their condition.

Step 2—Selling rations for money and livestock

We are taught that detailed managerial measures were employed by Joseph during this period. In Bereshit Rabbah (91, 4) it says that “it was prohibited for one man to enter the country with two asses and for assess to transport the produce from one place to another, and no one was permitted to enter the country without registering his name…” As Nahama Leibowitz explains, the reason for this was to ensure that no one would take more than the needs of their household. We are even taught in Midrash that Joseph the detailed-oriented manager poured over the lists of names himself.

While Joseph took his people’s money and livestock in exchange for food, Moses, with God’s help, provided Manna for free, asking for nothing in exchange. Joseph took all of what his people had to give and gave them just enough to live on for another year. Joseph knew the famine would continue. What did Joseph think the people would do the next year when they would be out of money and valuables, but starving once again? Did Joseph’s managerial plan call for step three?

Step 3—Turning free land owners into landless serfs

Once the Egyptian’s rations were depleted, they again begged for food and this time they offered their land and their freedom.

Joseph accepted their offer to turn themselves into landless serfs. Leibowitz suggests that the Egyptian’s request was not unusual: “Deeply rooted is man’s instinct to shirk responsibility for himself and his livelihood and that of his family. He would much rather saddle his superior with the burden of providing for him, let him do all his thinking for him, give him orders, lead him and support him.” Joseph’s buys into this proposition hook line and sinker and rather than say no, let me lead you through this, he says sure, I will manage you as well. I will purchase you and your land for Pharaoh.

Bible translator and commentator Everett Fox notes that some see the story as an ironic reversal of what’s to come in Exodus, with the Egyptian enslavement of the Israelites. It took Joseph the manager to create a slave state on behalf of his boss, Pharaoh; a few years later, it will take Moses the leader to free the slaves on behalf of his boss.

By the end of Vayigash, Joseph had effectively created for Pharaoh a monopolistic regime previously undreamed about. Thanks to Joseph’s prudent administration for his boss Pharaoh, the Egyptians sold their land to Pharaoh and sold themselves to into slavery along with it. And once this deed was done, Joseph “removed the population town by town.” Single-handedly, Joseph enabled Pharaoh to become a worse dictator than he already was, he deprived the Egyptians of their land and their freedom, and he deported them. Joseph turned the system in which he was responsible for into something less humane than it was before he got there.

Joseph’s behavior has often been excused because he owed his freedom to Pharaoh, who rescued him from prison. We shouldn’t accept this. Throughout history, leaders have chosen to accept imprisonment as a leader rather than freedom as something less. For this we need to look no further than Nelson Mandela, Natan Sharansky, or Leo Baeck.

Some have argued that Joseph’s enslavement of the Egyptians is irrelevant, because he was not serving his own people—the Israelites—and so his behavior was justified. We must challenge this as well.

First, he was put in charge of the population, therefore they were his people. If you accept leadership, you must act as if the people you serve are “your people.” Second of all, whether you are in charge of Am Yisrael or Am Mitzriim, mistreating the “Am” is not the Jewish way. As Joseph does to the Egyptian people, so a later Pharaoh in Moses time will do to the Israelites. Neither are excusable.

Wrap Up

I don’t mean to disparage Joseph; to the contrary. The man had a tough life, and he did quite well for himself, for his government, and for his family. However, I think Torah includes this odd chapter on his administration techniques to teach us managerial pitfalls to avoid.

What if Joseph had been a leader rather than just a manager? How would his behavior have changed?

Would he have helped the people store their own food? Would he have bought their food during the surplus years at a higher price instead of the lowest possible price so that they would have had cash on hand for the difficult years? Would he have loaned them money so that they could buy food and keep their land and pay him back once the famine was over?

What would we have done? Who would we have served?

What kind of Rabbis, Cantors and Educators will we become? We will of course become managers, that will be part of our job. But will we become leaders as well? Will we become beholden to policy or to principle? Politics or people? Will we be more concerned with doing Jewish things right or doing the right Jewish things?

We probably won’t face the same challenges that Joseph did—we won’t be thrown into a pit, accused of sexual immorality, thrown in jail, or be put in charge of two million starving people while trying to placate a boss who thinks he’s God, but we will have many challenges and difficult choices to make in the years ahead. We’ll have competing interests that will pull us in multiple directions. Sometimes the best choices will not benefit our careers or our synagogue boards, our even our core congregants. Sometimes we will be told to manage, when we really need to lead. When faced with these difficult decisions on whether to manage or to lead, let’s not forget who it really is, before whom we stand and for whom we must ultimately serve.