About 70 pages into one of the many leadership-focused books on my bookshelf is an insight that actually did change my approach to leadership. The book, The Process Matters: Engaging and Equipping People for Success, by Joel Brockner, explains that some people are “promotion-motivated” while others are “prevention-motivated.” These terms describe the kind of incentives that will impel someone to behave differently.
Promotion-motivated people are excited when told about the great things change can bring. They are eager to reach new heights and will work hard to achieve something better. By contrast, prevention-motivated people respond more strongly when told what bad things may happen without the change. Here, fear of loss creates the urgency needed to shift behaviors. Both are common ways of moving through the world, and neither is better or worse, Brockner contends.
Not only do people fail to respond when offered the wrong kind of motivation, but the mismatch can actually induce the opposite effect: demotivation and disengagement. Hearing about these two different dispositions, you may have an intuitive sense of your inclination toward one of the other.
Parashat Bechukotai contains what we often call “the blessings” and “the curses” — two lists offering two possible pathways forward. “If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments” (Leviticus 26:3), the first list opens, and then it enumerates the overwhelming blessings the people will enjoy: food will be plentiful, peace will be complete, you’ll win all the wars, easily and before breakfast. Next come the curses: “But if you do not obey Me and do not observe all these commandments …” (Leviticus 26:14), followed by a list of terrible things that will befall the people if they ignore God’s laws. This section of the Torah is so brutal that I won’t quote it here. In fact, when read aloud during the Torah service, the reader will often rush through it in a quiet undertone. That’s how bad it is.
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God, it seems, understood promotion- and prevention-motivated people. For the promotion-motivated among us, the promise of closeness with God is more than enough to entice us to keep these beautiful mitzvot. For the prevention-motivated, the curses will surely do the trick. What’s a few commandments for a chance to avoid such an unbearable fate?
I am promotion-motivated to an extreme, which means I love these blessings. I could read Leviticus 26:3-13 over and over again. I could print out these words and hang them over my desk, maybe tuck them into the journal at my bedside. And just as Brockner’s book warned, I have no use for the curses. In fact, I can’t bring myself to read them closely, even now, while writing this essay. Spending too much time with these threats might damage my relationship with the mitzvot, and so, like the public Torah reader, I avoid them.
The Process Matters argues that to be an effective leader, one must understand the people you lead and offer the appropriate motivator. Because I am promotion-motivated, it can be hard for me to remember that this isn’t the same for everyone. And the reverse is also true: Many leaders who are motivated by fear of loss forget to spend time on the possible blessings. The Torah knows that the Jewish people need both. We cannot move an entire people forward with only blessings or only curses.
This is an important lesson for today’s Jewish leaders. So many of the most prominent and important contemporary Jewish voices are speaking in the prevention register. Every day, I read articles and emails warning me of all the terrible things that may happen to the Jews: We won’t be safe, we will lose our moral conscience, we won’t be textually or culturally literate, we will be left behind technologically, our grandchildren may not be Jewish at all. The list of looming threats goes on and on.
At Hadar, I have tried to offer a corrective to what I perceive as an overemphasis on the “curses” that may befall us. I aim to center my leadership instead around a positive religious vision for promotion-motivated Jews. Instead of focusing primarily on (the very real!) threats, we speak about what Judaism could be: joyfully living out a relationship with God and each other, delighting in Torah and mitzvot, making the world kinder and more whole. I know the curses are there, and there are times when I will need to read them, but for now, I am choosing the blessings.
This essay initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on May 9, 2026. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
