By Alex Bolotovsky, CEO of J Leaders
Parsha in a Nutshell
In Parashat Beha’alotcha, the honeymoon phase of leaving Egypt is officially over. The people start complaining bitterly about the food, romanticizing their time in Egypt, and demanding meat (Numbers 11:4-6). Moses hits a wall of absolute burnout. He doesn’t give a polished leadership speech; instead, he goes to God and vents: “I cannot carry this entire people alone, for it is too heavy for me” (Numbers 11:14). God’s response isn’t to give Moses superpowers; it’s to tell him to appoint 70 elders to share the load.
Diving Deeper: Distributing the Spirit
This is one of the most raw text snippets in the Torah. Moses literally tells God that if he has to keep leading alone, he’d rather just quit on the spot.
Many young managers and startup founders suffer from this exact same “Hero Syndrome.” You think that asking for help or delegating high-stakes decisions is a sign of weakness. So, you work late, you micro-manage, and you try to be the single source of truth for the entire project.
But the text proves that even the greatest leader in history had a hard limit.
When God tells Moses to gather the 70 elders, He says: “I will draw upon the spirit that is on you and place it upon them” (Numbers 11:17). Notice that God didn’t bring in outside consultants or change the team’s culture. He took Moses’ vision and cloned it into 70 other people. True scale isn’t about you doing more work; it’s about you investing time into training others so they can execute with your same level of care and context.
Weekly Leadership Challenge
- Locate Your Wall: Look at your current workload. What is the one task or project that is currently making you dread opening your laptop? Admit that you can’t carry it alone.
- Clone Your “Spirit”: Pick a trusted teammate or peer this week. Instead of just dumping a task on them, spend 15 minutes explaining how you think through the problem and why you make certain decisions.
- Drop the Hero Act: The next time a project hits a major roadblock this week, don’t stay up until 2 AM fixing it in secret. Bring it to the team. Say: “Here is the problem we are facing, and I need your brains to help solve it.”