What is a "leader?" Is it a person who leads? Who finds the right pathway to safety in the dark? Who instinctively knows the right course of action? Is it a person who commands the respect, loyalty and trust of the greatest number? Who inspires people to follow? Is it a man so confident of his own plan that he can ignore, discard or never bother to seek advice? Who sees his own leadership as so indispensible to the success of the enterprise that he can neither share, entrust nor bequeath that leadership to anyone else? Where on this slippery slope do we move from the definition of a leader to the definition of a autocrat?
Tonight, I'm filled with sadness and some degree of fear. Sadness for Prime Minister Sharon and his family, for a country teetering on the edge of mourning but still struggling with whether to hope, for all of us who have lost or almost lost a loved one to this terrible affliction and betrayal of the body. Fear for how and in which direction Israel itself will recover and move forward once this crisis concludes and for whether and to what extent her neighbors and "friends" will attempt to exploit it.
But I have to confess that I'm also angry. And my anger is directed in no small part toward the man in that hospital bed in Ein Kerem. In his semi-hysterical column today (thanks, Meryl), Charles Krauthammer makes this final observation:
Sharon put Israel on the only rational strategic path out of that wreckage. But, alas, he had taken his country only halfway there when he himself was taken away. And he left no Joshua.
Hillel Halkin (ditto) put it more bluntly:
Mr. Sharon will go down as one of the best prime ministers in Israel's history, one who won a war against terror that was deemed unwinnable and restored a sense of direction to a people that had lost it. Yet if, as has often been said, one mark of a great leader is his making sure that he has a successor, or that there is at least a clear procedure for choosing one, Mr. Sharon fell short of greatness. In impetuously leaving the Likud to found Kadima, it never occurred to him that, at the age of 77, he would not be around for at least a few more years. It should have, though. That's not the kind of oversight that a meticulous planner like him should have been guilty of.
It's no secret that I don't share either Krauthammer's or Halkin's admiration for the course Sharon has chosen over the past two years, but this sentiment I do share, and I'd go further. Far from being an oversight, I think that Sharon's failure to groom a successor was deliberate, and, ironically, born of the same sort of hubris that motivated a similar "oversight" in his nemesis, the late, unlamented chairman of the PLO.
Meryl is right that the hysteria is overblown and that all this talk about a rudderless state, adrift with no captain, ripe for disaster, blah blah blah, goes way too far. But the fact is that the best interests of the country required its Prime Minister to contemplate his own mortality, most especially given his age and health problems, and the possibility, no, the necessity, of planning for a future without him at the helm. This, he did not do. And the country to which he dedicated his life may very well suffer deeply for it.
(See also: Soccer Dad)
Shabbat Shalom.
