I read a fascinating commentary yesterday from Rabbi Ari Kahn. He referred to the last chapter of the five books of Moses, Deuteronomy.

As the curtain is being drawn with sadness and drama, the reader is reminded of “the mighty acts and great sights that Moshe displayed before the eyes of all Israel.” And the greatest of all those moments is when Moses shatters the first set of commandments.

Ari Kahn asks a valuable question: Why is Moses, the law giver, to be remembered as the ‘law breaker’? He answers thus:

He smashed the Tablets, and started again. He worked his way back up the mountain, literally and figuratively, from ground zero. Rather than eradicating the evidence of failure, the shattered Tablets were housed and guarded in the very same Holy Ark as the second set of Tablets that Moshe brought down to the people.

Moshe “did not despair. He started again, undiscouraged, and led the people to a new beginning.” As Kahn surmises,the lesson here is that our eventual successes are seen as an outgrowth of previous failures. 

As a business mentor, I am frequently faced by people with new ideas, but who do not know how to start. They are afraid. They have not found out enough information. They become entangled in that ‘what if scenario’. (What if this, that or the other goes wrong).

My job in all of this? First, it is to show the client how very often the pieces of the jigsaw are lying right in front of them. I have to explain how they can go out and find the missing elements. They will learn, step-by-step, when and how to put it all together. And yes, the road may not be simple nor speedy – hopefully not 40 years long.

Second, I am required to teach clients how they have to keep ‘working and guarding’ their achievements, constantly giving their best against all challenges. And yes, it is Kahn who pointed out this was the very charge given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Ostensibly simple, but look what a serpent can ruin!

Funny how biblical writings taught us these methodologies thousands of years before universities and the internet came along.