These days, we have somehow decided that humility is a weakness. We prize the confident voice over the careful one, and the person who answers quickly over the person who answers well.
And so we form a view before we have grasped the facts, because hesitating makes us look incompetent. Then we perform an expertise we do not possess.
But this week’s parsha explores a counter-cultural proposition. Moses describes God as “the great, mighty and awe-inspiring God, who shows no favoritism and accepts no bribe.” Then we read in the very next verse that God “upholds the cause of the orphan and widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing.” Supreme power and tender attention to the powerless are set side by side. The Talmudic sage Rabbi Yochanan built a teaching on this juxtaposition: wherever you find the greatness of God, there you find His humility. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks gave it a phrase: greatness is humility.
The Torah’s model leader proves the point. Moses, the greatest figure in the Jewish story, is described not as the cleverest or the strongest, but as “very humble, more so than anyone on the face of the earth.” Rabbi Sacks noted that this pairing was a revolution. While the god-kings of Egypt and Mesopotamia lined their temples with statues to their own glory, the Torah imagined a God defined by humility and a king who must write a Torah scroll and keep it close so that his heart “be not lifted above his brethren.”
The same principle emerges in the story of Israel’s first kings. Saul and David both sinned against God, and both were confronted by a prophet. Both, in the end, uttered the same Hebrew word, chatati, “I have sinned.” Yet only Saul lost his throne. Rabbi Sacks located the difference not in their sins but in their respective responses: what counts is whether you “recognise and admit your wrongdoings, and you change as a result.” Saul reached first for excuses. David owned his mistake—so much so that Leo McGarry, the hard-nosed political operative on The West Wing who warned the President never to acknowledge a mistake, would have been horrified.
The willingness to say “I have sinned” and “I don’t know” come from the same place: both require the humility to admit that we may be wrong.
And yet today, it seems like everyone—right and left, pulpit and parliament—has come to read the refusal to admit error as a kind of strength. Leaders insist against all evidence that they were right all along.
They do so for a clear reason: we reward them for their denials. We are not merely the victims of such leaders. We are their market. We are drawn to certainty because we feel unanchored, and someone else’s confidence feels like solid ground. When a person speaks as though he has no doubts, we borrow his conviction to cover our own. That is the transaction.
This is our parsha’s insight: that humility is only bearable for someone anchored in something larger than themselves. The person of faith is secure not in their own certainty but in God, and that changes how much certainty they are required to manufacture. If I trust that the world does not rest on my being right, then I am free not to be right.
The same God who is great beyond measure is the one before whom I am finally allowed to be small. And to be small, it turns out, is not a humiliation but a relief.
So perhaps our task is not to summon more confidence. Perhaps it is to make humility great again: to grow easy with the words “I’m not sure,” “I might be wrong,” “help me understand.” Not because we have given up on truth, but because we have stopped pretending we already own it.
Rabbi Matt Marks is Executive Head of Tribe UK, the youth arm of the United Synagogue, and a PhD researcher specialising in the thought of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. He lives in Brighton & Hove with his wife and their four daughters, where he also serves as a Strategic Adviser for Jewish Life and works with the UK Jewish Chaplaincy team.
This essay was written as part of our collaboration with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Sacks Scholars.
