Moses' Circulating Mode of Power in the Book of Exodus

Moses' Circulating Mode of Power in the Book of Exodus

Rev. Douglas Olds

18 October 2014, Revised 15 December 2014

"It's good to be between a ruined house of bondage and a holy promised land."  --Leonard Cohen

Exodus derives from a record of communicative acts that shape the nation of Israel.  The figure of Moses may have a kernel of historical existence, but his person has been shaped by the writing down and 500 years of redaction of oral traditions, so that the leadership acts of Moses have been shaped by the historical needs of a group of separate tribes to coalesce into a nation, while the nation itself has been influenced by the traditions of Moses’ delivering leadership involved in the narrative. As such, the portrayal of leadership in Exodus is dialectical: its mythic account shapes the history of the people who themselves exert influence on how the text and persons of Exodus evolved through time from an oral tradition into a fixed canonical text by the post-Babylonian exile period, 6th -2nd C BCE. Brevard Childs notes, “the literature formed the identity of the religious community which in turn shaped the literature.”[1]

Leadership modes exemplify what Stortz[2] describes as coercive, charismatic, and coactive powers, to which I add a fourth category , leadership power withdrawal. In the Book of Exodus the leader is Yahweh (LORD) calling forth an oppressed people.  The LORD makes use of a deliverer-leader, Moses. Note how Moses exercises leadership power.  At first, Moses is described as an Egyptian prince who feels the pangs of empathy for the oppressed Hebrew slaves.  As an Egyptian prince, he attempts to exercise hierarchical, coercive power over those slaves, attempting patriarchically to “deliver them” through violence. He murders a violent overseer. (Ex. 2.11). Then he intends to exert more hierarchical authority by settling a Hebrew dispute: 

Ex. 2.13 When he went out the next day, he saw two Hebrews fighting; and he said to the one who was in the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?” 14 He answered, “Who made you a ruler and judge over us?

Moses’ attempted leadership is not recognized because he has no acknowledged kinship with the Hebrews (though according to the text he has become aware of his Hebrew birth and empathies born of kinship).

Soon Moses flees, the first of his leadership “withdrawals.”  This is an interesting pattern, as first a potential leader tries to exert hierarchical power (power over) the community based on “natural” or in-born authority.  Sooner or later, this kind of coercive power over fails, and the leader flees or withdraws into a wilderness (cf. Nixon’s periodic and strategic withdrawals after defeats).

It is helpful to note that Moses' soul of leadership represents a liminal or mestizo character. He has the psychological affinity for and attitude of Hebrew marginalization, but the training and raising of Egyptian royalty.  God lifts up the liminal or mixed soul for the leadership personality, rather than follows secular leadership paradigm that demonstrates that the leader decisively exemplifies the strength and values of the homogeneous group.  Moses does not represent decisiveness because he is liminally situated between his experience in the values and society of the Egyptian elite, while he empathizes with the injustices experienced by the Hebrews.  His leadership "soul" or psychological actualization demonstrate some cognitive dissonance that is overcome by his calling by God to lead from his compassionate sense, for the benefit of the oppressed. Henri Nouwen in The Wounded Healer asserts, "the great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there."

Patterns and Trajectory of Power:  engagement and retreat exemplified by Moses

I.                   “Power over” leadership

II.                  Power failure

III.                Strategic withdrawal of leader into wilderness (tsimtsum, see below)

IV.                Spiritual struggle and rebirth (Moses in Midian, Ex. Ch. 3)

V.                  Charismatic call (Ex. 4): Moses is enabled by “Power within.” Yet manifests cognitive dissonance in his soul because of his prior experiences and social relationship.\

VI.                 Power sharing

VII.                 Episodic  (tactical) leadership withdrawals

VIII.               Return with Intercessory power


“Power within” is charismatic power that submits to the true holder of “power over”, that is the LORD.  However, Moses protests that his charismatic power is limited.  Moses asks, perhaps from anxiety, for his “brother” Aaron to serve as mouthpiece. Leadership becomes shared between Moses and Aaron in the struggle with Pharaonic power.  Moses and Aaron’s shared leadership thus becomes a third kind of power, “power with” or coactive power (Stortz 1993) [2]. “Power with” is mutual, reciprocal, involves choices, and involves equality.  Aaron is likewise an etiological figure: he is an individualized mythic figure for the later Aaronid priests who served the Israelite temple.  Note how leadership is shared between Moses and Aaron (and later, the “sister” Miriam.).  The egalitarian, mutual and reciprocal relationship between Moses and Aaron becomes a kind of ideal for the nation-state of Israel that formally invested power with prophet and priest.  Moses is prophet, Aaron is priest.  Leadership power in Exodus is coactive between these two ideal roles in the dialectical formulation of Israel’s history. 

        Intertestamental traditions of the Jews interpreted Ex 2.2 as a statement about the the unusual attractiveness of the baby Moses (Kugel 1998, 527) [7], a fineness of physical form and carriage that carried into adulthood. This physical fineness complements charismatic power and leadership over those people who discerned that Moses was especially favored by God, and they thus responded to him as "intercessory leader" (cf. Barton 2008, ch. 9).  That is, the people were consoled and motivated that the charismatic leader as favored one of God would pray for them.  Moses demonstrates charismatic leadership that even negotiates with God--to change God's intentions toward the people (Ex. 32.14).   This scriptural demonstration of intercessory power may conflict with more (post)modern views of leadership whereby the leader risks and models vulnerability for followers/the people, which is coactive.  Moses' intercessory leadership power with God follows his charismatic endowment and calling.
       
   An Egyptian prince with the schema of privilege and power , Moses was not used to not getting his way.  Frustration may have been a defining characteristic of his soul’s schematic adaptation as he moved into his liminal state of withdrawal to Midian (and later withdrawal for 40 days and nights onto Mount Horeb).  This tendency to meet leadership frustration with withdrawal suggests that Moses promoted episodic leadership vacuums, and consequently chaos might intrude into the Complex Adaptive Systems in which he was involved. The whole of the desert wanderings seem to so testify to this chaotic outbreak in the Exodus people’s encampments.  Moses had the soul for leadership: attractiveness, privileged upbringing, and entitlement to command, and he had survived a liminal and wilderness danger to his being in his own personal flight from Egypt. Moses’s soul was experienced with both wilderness danger and with the uses of charisma (physical and spiritual) to lead a group back into the wilderness.

There is a fourth kind of leadership power in Exodus, the withdrawal or what 16th C Kabbalists termed in Hebrew, tsimtsum.  Moses withdraws first to Midian for reflection, reeducation, and new call, then in Ex. 19 up alone onto Mt. Sinai for 40 days. He withdraws from leadership of the community for charismatic renewal (and eventually for the community’s covenantal renewal). Note what happens to the Exodus community and even Aaron.  The community and the norm-keeping priests need the charismatic leader/prophet to cohere, and they break down in sin in his absence.

Withdrawal of the charismatic/creative leader represents what the Kabbalists discerned in the creative act of God by God’s withdrawal: creative leadership may be effected by withdrawal, so that the community may take on responsibility, maturity, and new roles in the leader’s absence:

Lurianic Kabbala [16th C] propounds a theory of the creation and subsequent degeneration of an equilibrium and a practical method of attempting to restore the original harmony/equilibrium, now radically changed and partially debased in the context of the original perfection of initial state as structured by a divine Center of Value (Scholem 1955/Jacobs 1995, 325).[3]

Borowitz  (1974, 692) notes, “God does not initiate the existence of other things by extending himself. There would be no place for them to be, no area of non-being or partial being in which they might exist. Hence to create, he must first withdraw into himself. God must, so to speak, make himself less than he is so that other things could come into being.”[4]

Creation comes out of this withdrawal (tzimtzum) as from chaos. The equilibrium moves from catastrophe when the divine sparks enter the void, filling the containers which are both autonomous  and new bearers of the sparks of the center of value.  Borowitz’s proposal is that charismatic leaders reduce their radiance and allow new leadership “containers” to take shape under the “example” or paradigm of the center of value exemplified in the charismatic leader.  Tzimtzum thus becomes a method of leadership withdrawal, a mimetic example, and emergence of new leadership forms and system equilibria.  It is consistent with Schneider and Somers (2006, 356) [5] description of CAS [Complex Adaptive Systems] leaders as “tags” and influencers of others outside of constant exertion of power.  Tzimtzum (withdrawal) by leaders allows space for social movements that honor the center of value [God] in novel ways unanticipated by the charismatic or hierarchical leader.  That leader demonstrates confidence in the center of value by allowing these social movements to take shape, carving out a space for the emergence of novelty and adaptation which otherwise would not occur in the presence of command and control compliance. The community may take on responsibility and new roles in the leader’s absence (of course, in Exodus, withdrawal by Moses to Mt. Horeb for 40 days and nights tolerates and stimulates community breakdown, but yet later in Exodus even that community breakdown serves God’s liberating, re-creative purpose).

This dialectical struggle of the now leaderless vessels to restore harmony after the self-willed withdrawal of the Center of Value/divinely-ordained charismatic leader necessitates the development of the changed attitude of maturity. This attitude is sung and played in the tragic narrative of certain Psalms. Often, but not always, this attitude may demonstrate Stoic, maladaptive, or narcissistic tendencies.  If we take this pattern seriously, the follower will struggle to attain a maturity that recognizes the former naïve solipsism and innocent contentment with the center of value as an equilibrium that cannot be recovered.  Rehabilitated growth and adaptation requires living dialectically with both nostalgia and resolve. Mature exercise of power reflects this joy of survival and meaning making even in the face of a tragic, lyrical and blues-filled narrative of irretrievable loss.



NOTES:

[1] The dialectical nature of the Moses’ narrative as it feeds back on national development is a position associated with Brevard Childs. Childs favors a sociological understanding of Moses’ role:

“Especially in such passages as Ex. 20:18–20 and Deut. 19:15ff., that which is being described is not simply a historical event, but rather an etiology for the establishment of something institutional and ongoing. Moses’ role as covenantal mediator in the Sinai tradition has a decided cultic stamp which seems to point to an office within an institution.” --Beegle, D. M. (1992). Moses (Person): Old Testament. In (D. N. Freedman, Ed.)The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, vol 4, p. 910. New York: Doubleday.

[2] Mary Ellen Stortz, Pastor Power. Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1993.

[3] Gershom G. Scholem, 'Isaac Luria and his School', in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (London, 1955), 244­86 reprinted in  Jacobs, Louis (ed.). The Jewish Religion : A Companion, Oxford : Oxford University Press. 1995, p. 325-6.

[4] Eugene B. Borowitz. “TZIMTZUM: A Mystic Model for Contemporary Leadership.” Religious Education 69, 1974, pp. 687-700.
[5] Schneider, M. and M. Somers. “Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems: Implications of Complexity Theory for Leadership Research.” Leadership Quarterly 17, 2006, 351-365.
[6] Barton, Ruth Haley. Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry. Intervarsity Press, 2008, ch. 9.
[7] Kugel, James. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as it Was at the Start of the Common Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998.