What are the top two qualities you need to be successful today at whatever it is you want to achieve, whatever challenges you are facing?
How often are ‘strength and courage’ on the top-ten list?
‘Be Strong and Courageous!’ Is the affirmation linked to this next chapter in our history, beginning today. The charge appears 8 times in the Hebrew Bible - 4 of them in this first chapter of the Book of Joshua, 2 more times in the previous chapters of Torah, setting up this leadership transition from Moses to Joshua. Twice more it shows up in the context of King David’s handing over the crown to his son Solomon.
Do some leaders, people and nations need more of these essential qualities than others? Are strength and courage needed especially when we face transitions, threats or step into the big shoes of our ancestors to find our own place, voice, footing in the world? This empowering charge seems to know when to show up as needed.
We don’t know much about Joshua , Son of Noon. He first shows up as one of the young men in the entourage of Moses, half way through the journey through the wilderness, later making his leadership debut as one of the 12 scouts sent to spy on Canaan. He is finally announced by Adonai as the intended heir, along with the blessing - ‘Be Brave and Courageous’.
As the warrior entrusted with the military campaign of settling Canaan and unsettling its indigenous nations - he’ll need it, and much more. It isn’t just military leadership that will be demanded of him. In the opening chapter of this book that those of us on the Below the Bible Belt journey begin today, Adonai makes it clear that Joshua, like Moses, is also in charge of the people’s religious responsibilities and moral character. To keep the safety and to keep the faith he’ll need extra help. Not just strength but also stamina to endure. It’s built into the blessing: The second of these two Hebrew adjectives can be read not only as ‘courageous’ but also as ‘persistent’ or ‘resolute’.
רַק֩ חֲזַ֨ק וֶאֱמַ֜ץ מְאֹ֗ד לִשְׁמֹ֤ר לַֽעֲשׂוֹת֙ כְּכׇל־הַתּוֹרָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֤ר צִוְּךָ֙ מֹשֶׁ֣ה עַבְדִּ֔י אַל־תָּס֥וּר מִמֶּ֖נּוּ יָמִ֣ין וּשְׂמֹ֑אול לְמַ֣עַן תַּשְׂכִּ֔יל בְּכֹ֖ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר תֵּלֵֽךְ׃
“But you must be very strong and resolute to observe faithfully all the Teaching that My servant Moses enjoined upon you. Do not deviate from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go.”
Strength, courage and persistence have long been recognized as essential qualities for Jewish survival as well as for political leaders, so it’s no surprise that "Be Strong and of Good Courage" is the title of a recent book by American statesman Dennis Ross, co-authored with Israeli-American journalist David Makovsky, analyzing Israel’s founding fathers and their legacies for today. “It is a story that can provide guidance for today's leaders in Israel and for all of us on the meaning of leadership” - is how Hillary Rodham Clinton endorsed this book.
One of the founding fathers analyzed in the book is David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister. In 1958, marking Israel’s 10th birthday, Ben Gurion chose to focus on the text of Joshua’s conquest as the template for remembering the 1948 war and making sense of Israel’s formation and its continued tensions with its Arab residents and neighbors.
Ben Gurion’s choice to use Joshua as the master story for the new state’s first steps is fascinating, probleamtic and complex. Even advertisements for chocolate picked up on this biblical charge and made ‘be strong and courageous’ into a successful campaign in the 1950’s, depicting brave pilots snacking on the ‘best of the best’.
As we take the next month reading through Joshua we’ll explore more of his perspective, some of it troubling, as illuminated by the brilliant research of Dr. Rachel Havrelock in her book The Joshua Generation. Ben Gurion, she claims “understood the book of Joshua as evidence that national independence was the only possible redemptive outcome of Jewish exile, at all costs.”
In 2022, the old charge needs a recharge. What other qualities may the leaders of today and tomorrow, in Israel and elsewhere, need in order to tell a new tale that goes beyond the old traumas of survival, occupation, fear and the repetition of the same old stories? What about vulnerability and compassion? Or tenderness and truth?
Yehduah Amichai, one of Israel’s most beloved poetic voices, who fought for Israel’s birth alongside the founding fathers and knew his bible well, using words to remind us of what happens when strength and courage become the main levers of leadership prioritizing survival at all costs:
You mustn't show weakness
and you've got to have a tan.
But sometimes I feel like the thin veils
of Jewish women who faint
at weddings and on Yom Kippur.
You mustn't show weakness
and you've got to make a list
of all the things you can load
in a baby carriage without a baby.
This is the way things stand now:
if I pull out the stopper
after pampering myself in the bath,
I'm afraid that all of Jerusalem, and with it the whole world,
will drain out into the huge darkness.
In the daytime I lay traps for my memories
and at night I work in the Balaam Mills,
turning curse into blessing and blessing into curse.
And don't ever show weakness.
Sometimes I come crashing down inside myself
without anyone noticing. I'm like an ambulance
on two legs, hauling the patient
inside me to Last Aid
with the wailing of cry of a siren,
and people think it's ordinary speech.
(Translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell )
The journey with Joshua is just getting started today, as we prepare to cross the Jordan, with strength, persistence, poetry, curiosity, commitment to truth, and.. what’s the quality you need or are bringing to this joined journey? Please let us know!
Be strong, fear less, love more.
Image: Advertisement for Lieber Chocolate, Israel 1950’s, featuring an Air Force pilot with the Biblical quote in Hebrew ‘Be Strong and Courageous!
Below the Bible Belt: 929 chapters, 42 months, daily reflections: Join Rabbi Amichai’s 3+ years interactive online quest to question, queer + re-read between the lines of the entire Hebrew Bible, with daily reflections, weekly videos and monthly learning sessions. January 2022-July 2025
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The juxtaposition of Yehuda Amichai's introspective, feminine poem with God's demands on Joshua to be strong and resolute is a brilliant choice.
I think some generations need a Moses or a Joshua and other's need a Noah or Adam.