Monday, April 18th 2011
Today is a very important day for me:
the opening my first Internet page as a Life Success Consultant and…
Tonight is the first night of the Jewish “Passover” a Holy Day when we remember our Exodus from being slaves to Freedom.
According to the Jewish calendar April, the month of Spring is also the first month in our calendar, remembering the times we escaped from slavery and became free people.
I want to tell you the story of Moshe (Moses) the most inappropriate person chosen by God to be the leader of the Jewish people; Moshe who transformed to ultimately become the best Salesman and Coach in History.
I have chosen to tell the story of Moshe as an example for any person who wish to beFree, to each and every person who wants to change and improve his or her life.
“Pesach” (in Hebrew language) is one of the three most important Holy Days for the Jewish people. On this Holy Day we are celebrating the end of 430 years of slavery in Egypt, and the beginning of a free nation return back to its homeland; the Promised land – Israel.
In the old times, when the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was in its place, people from all around Israel used to walk to Jerusalem and celebrate the Holy Days of Pesach, one of the three most important holidays, by the Temple.
The explanation for the name – “Pass-Over” is located in the story of how Moshe “Sold” Pharaoh the idea of let the Jewish people to be free. It was not an easy idea, and Pharaoh needed ten plagues to be convinced. The last plague, Angel of death was “passing over” the Jewish houses which door frames were marked with the blood of the Lambthat was prepared for dinner before they were released to freedom. The Jewish people got very strict orders to be dressed and packed ready for a long journey, “Prepare your bread as crackers with no yeast, roast your meat on fire and most important, stay inside your home till you are ordered to leave”.
The concept of freedom we celebrate on this Holy Day is much more than just the liberation of the physical body from slavery. More important is the mental liberation, the freedom of the mind which affects a person’s way of thinking and action.
God had chosen Moshe to be the salesperson with only two “clients”: the first job was to be the leader and mentor of the Jewish people, to convince them – actually “sell” them a number of new ideas, one of the most important being free people and a free nation.
Moshe also had to “sell” the same idea of releasing the Jewish people from slavery to his second “client” – King Pharaoh. It seems that convincing King Pharaoh was an easier job than to change the mentality of slaves into mentality of free people.
Moshe was an inappropriate person for this task because of his own life story. He had a speech disorder which made it difficult for him to speak. According to the biblical story, Moshe as a young baby, after he was taken by Pharaoh’s daughter from the River Nile (the Hebrew meaning of Moshe’s name is: “taken from the water), Pharaoh advisers wanted to examine the child before accepting him into the royal family, to be certain he would not be a threat to the king. So they put in front of baby Moshe two bowls: one with Gold and the other one with burning coals.
Moshe extended his hand to grab the shiny one… but with the interference of God’s angel, his hand was pushed to the bowl of the burning coal which he put into his mouth.
This act probably saved Moshe’s life, but to be able to fulfill his life destinyand becoming the Jewish leader he needed the help of his brother Aaron to be used as his mouth to express God’s words to the people.
Reading the Bible we don’t know much about Moshe’s life story as a young person. Yet, we can guess that as a child and later as a young man who was adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter he was an outsider among the other Royal princes. Add to that fact the speech disorder, we can assume that he was not the girl’s favorite. All those facts didn’t add much to his self-confidence despite growing up in the Royal residence as a prince.
I would guess that Moshe was a lonely person, not welcome to hang around with the other royal princes and their companions.
We know the story of Moshe walking alone in the streets of Egypt seeing an Egyptian whipping a Jewish slave. Moshe killed the Egyptian (probably by accident) and as a result he needed to escape from Egypt.
Based on the fact that he needed to escape, it is clear that even though he was a ‘prince’ he was not very popular within the Royal family.
His escape from Egypt was no doubt with many fears and bad conscience from killing a person. He had to leave his regular convenient lifestyle, arrive to a country where probably he didn’t speak the language; a foreigner, keeping his personal history and background a secret.
Moshe was a good person with a good heart, and when he saw young women harassed by other shepherds, he protected them. Yitro, their father, paid him back by giving one of his daughters to be Moshe’s wife… he also gave him a job (probably his first job) to become a shepherd.
Moshe’s new job allowed him to develop his personality: strength, compassion, courage and a leader’s eye to be able to see his herd and control it also in dangerous times.
The story could be continued with a happy ending – Moshe having his shepherd business and family growing… But god had different plans; God decided it was the right time for the new future leader to do his life’s project. Unfortunately Moshe was not aware of God’s plans for him.
God called Moshe, and twicehe refused this new job offer, saying “who am I, to lead your people? “ And why would Pharaoh listen to him and let the people go… and why would the sons of Israel listen to him and believe that he is their new leader?
We can see that although Moshe’s personality changed, in his mind he still kept his old self-image.
God had to convince Moshe to change his own image, to see himself as the Shepherd and leader of God’s chosen children – the sons of Israel.
God sent Moshe to do his homework, some market research requiring him to talk with the people and the leaders of the Jewish tribes to tell them to get ready for their upcoming freedom.
God was fair enough to warn him, saying: “No matter what you say, they won’t “Buy” it easily… not Pharaoh nor the sons of Israel… but you need to have persistence, don’t give up regardless of how many “NO”s you may hear when you try to sell them these ideas.
Ten times Moshe needed to go to Pharaoh and perform miracles using the strength and power of God till Pharaoh convinced and agreed to “buy” this new idea, letting the Jewish people go… that was only after the tenth Plague, after the death of all the first born sons. It was a difficult idea for Pharaoh to give up on 600,000 men slaves (with women and kids they were about 2 million); he knew that it would affect the Egyptian economy.
And the sons of Israel… after Moshe went the first time to Pharaoh asking him to release them from Egypt, Pharaoh decided to punish them and make their life harder than it already was. So the sons of Israel were complaining to Moshe, saying: “before you came here to sell us your new ideas of freedom, our lives were much better than now…”
Selling ideas of freedom to slaves, sons of slaves… is not an easy task, especially when you consider that this was a nation of strong, stubborn people who didn’t really care even when the boss name is God.
During 430 years they were slaves, they didn’t know how to think as free men, and had no image and vision of being free people.
As we can read in the story when those ex slaves, the new released free people, sawthe first sign of difficulty, when they saw the clouds of dust that the big Egyptian army made when chasing them to bring them back to slavery. The people complained to Moshe: “what have you done to us?.. We had great life there…“. As we all know, most people prefer to stick to their old known habits than to have new unknown habits.
The sons of Israel were in a new stage in their life, it was an unknown situation and no matter how hard it was to be a slave, they preferred to stay in that known situation than to have something new.
Because of that mindset they had to walk in the desert, in circles for 40 years… a slave will always remain slave in his mind.
Only free man – a new generation of people had to be born in the freedom of the desert to be able to return back to the promise land and live as free men.
Moshe was the best salesperson on history, starting his way from a very low starting point, to the point where he managed to change a king’s mind by “selling” him the idea to release all of his slaves…
He also ‘sold’ the idea to the same group of slaves to start thinking as free men.
Moshe was a great leader; he managed to change those slaves to become one of the smallest nations with the highest moral codes – the Bible, and to be one of the most productive nations right up to present days.
Any great leader, salesperson or coach needs to have a good mentor behind him, usually we say that behind any successful man there is a woman… in the case of Moshe that mentor is called God – maybe then, God is a woman!!
