Today along with people in South Africa and the world I mourn the death of Nelson Mandela. A couple weeks ago in shul, I reflected on the meaning of the fascination in America with President Kennedy after his assassination, and in the course of writing that D'var Torah I realized that there are two things that make a leader truly great. It's a combination of integrity and achievement. The ability not only to articulate a vision, but to do real things to make vision become real, and to give thousands of people the opportunity to do something specific that advances the vision concretely, not symbolically.
Mandela was more even than the principle of political equality for blacks and whites in South Africa. After he was freed, he called for and modeled the work of reconciliation. He made the hard choice of "truth and reconciliation", rather than bringing his jailers and the unjust regime to strict justice. He did the work of the presidency of his country. As has been pointed out, he did something few strong African leaders did, which was to surrender power after his term.
The anti-apartheid struggle was a worldwide movement. It was the dominating political cause of my college years. Its strategies of economic and political pressure did not just affect the South African apartheid regime. It showed how involved we already were in apartheid, even across the world — corporations, universities through their investments. These perspectives and tactics have become the bread-and-butter of protest movements in the 1990s and beyond. They have helped show us that the world is interlinked, that our daily lives are bound up with injustices in far-away places.
Nelson Mandela was a person — he was human. His personal foibles, his policy choices, are all subject to the judgment of human beings. (Here is one interesting perspective on his economic policies and his grand bargain with the former regime.) But as with Dr. King, those things should not obscure his legacy, the moral force of his life, the greatness of his leadership in his country and the world. In troubled parts of the world, it's often said: If only they had a Mandela.
Y'hi zichro baruch – may his memory continue to bless his people and our world.
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