HOW DOES ONE KNOW THE SERVANT?

For those who follow and this is everyone, including those who lead the really critical question is: Who is this moral individual we would see as leader? Who is the servant? How does one tell a truly giving, enriching servant
from the neutral person or the one whose net influence is to take away from or diminish other people? Rabbi Heschel had just concluded a lecture on the Old Testament prophets in which he had spoken of true prophets and false prophets. A questioner asked him how one tells the difference between the true and the false prophets. The rabbi’s answer was succinct and to the point. “There is no way!” he said. Then he elaborated, “If there were a way, if one had a gauge to slip over the head of the prophet and establish without question that he is or he isn’t a true prophet, there would be no human dilemma and life would have no meaning.” So it is with the servant issue. If there were a dependable way that would tell us, “These people enrich by their presence, they are neutral, or they take away,” life would be without challenge. Yet it is terribly important that one know, both about oneself and about others, whether the net effect of one’s influence on others enriches, is neutral or diminishes and depletes. Since there is no certain way to know this, one must turn to the artists for illumination. Such an illumination is in Hermann Hesse’s idealized portrayal of the servant Leo whose servanthood comes through in his leadership. In stark modern terms it can also be found in the brutal reality of the mental hospital where Ken Kesey (in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) gives us Big Nurse strong, able, dedicated, dominating, authority-ridden, manipulative, exploitative the net effect of whose influence diminished other people, literally destroyed them. In the story she is pitted in a contest with tough, gutterbred MacMurphy, a patient, the net effect of whose influence is to build up people and make both patients and the doctor in charge of the ward grow larger as persons, stronger, healthier an effort that ultimately costs MacMurphy his life. If one will study the two characters, Leo and MacMurphy, one will get a measure of the range of possibilities in the role of servant as leader.