Divine Diplomacy: Three Torah Lessons for President Zelensky

Along with everyone else, I watched the televised disaster of a meeting between President Volodymyr Zelensky, President Trump and Vice-President Vance on Friday. As I watched, and reflected on it afterwards, I thought about the year 1979.

This is when the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin came to the United States to negotiate what would become the Camp David Accords with President Jimmy Carter and President Anwar Sadat. Before going to Camp David, he made three stops. He met with the three great American Rabbis of the day– Menachem Schneerson, Moshe Feinstein and Joseph B. Soloveitchik – to receive Torah guidance for the upcoming summit. All three reportedly told him to study the same Torah story – that of Jacob preparing to encounter his estranged twin brother Esau after more than two decades apart. The Torah, they insisted, contained within it the secrets to diplomatic success.

If President Zelensky had reached out for Torah guidance before his fateful meeting, the result may have been much different. The Torah offers clear, relevant, applicable and correct guidance for questions in all matters – and this one is a perfect example. While not at all exhaustive, here are three lessons I believe President Zelensky could have drawn from the Torah to aid his diplomatic efforts.

This Torah discussion is based on a couple of assumptions. First, what happened in the meeting? As the studies of eyewitness testimony have demonstrated, people routinely observe the same event and have very different recollections – to say nothing of analyses. That is certainly also the case with this video. So – I encourage everyone interested to watch the full video. I found this careful analysis by Miranda Devine of the New York Post to be accurate and astute.

Second, this analysis does not consider anything about the war itself – or the perspectives (right or wrong) from Republicans, Democrats, Ukrainians, Russians, Europeans or anyone else. It does not matter that President Zelensky, as he surely did, wished that President Trump shared his perspective. This reminds me of the old story of the driver who pulls into a gas station and asks the attendant, “How do I get there from here?”

The attendant replies: “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.”

A negotiator must always start from here -- and for Zelensky, that is where Trump was. He, like all negotiators, had to deal with the counterparty across from him – for better or for worse.

Preparation

In Exodus 19, God is ready to give the Torah to the Jewish people. But he does not do so immediately. Instead, he tells them to prepare themselves to receive it three days later. This imperative of preparation recurs throughout the Torah – in the seven day period process that Aaron and others went through to become priests in Exodus, in the detailed process that governs the run-up to the Yom Kippur service in Leviticus, in the elaborate process the High Priest goes through to sacrifice the red heifer in Numbers and elsewhere. Rav Soloveitchik captured the Torah’s imperative in his statement: “There is no holiness without preparation.”

As we also see in the Torah, preparation is sometimes long and strategic and sometimes short and tactical. President Zelensky knew from the very beginning of this terrible war three years ago that he would need fulsome American support. The least that the United States could have expected from Ukraine was completely reliable support at the United Nations. Ukraine should have wanted to make it clear, on the world stage, that it was with the United States everywhere it could be. Ukraine did not provide this – particularly on resolutions related to Israel’s war with Hamas. This was non-strategic and even odd, given that Russia consistently sided with Israel’s enemies following October 7.

This consistent support would have prepared Ukraine for the decisive moment for the United States – which occurred on Friday.

But that’s not all. He should have been carefully attuned to the beliefs, personalities, attitudes and priorities of his American counterparts – and structured his participation with strategic empathy. If President Zelensky were prepared for the meeting at the Oval Office, he would have avoided the other tactical mistakes he made – as described below.

Clothing

In Genesis 25, Rebecca engineers a scheme to trick her blind husband Isaac into believing that their son Jacob is Esau – a painful move necessary to put the mantle of Jewish leadership in the hands of their son who could advance it. Rebecca’s technique is deeply instructive. She tells Jacob to put on Esau’s “best clothes.”

Why his “best” clothes – especially as the old man was blind? Because Rebecca had a profound psychological insight, which is validated in contemporary research: We feel in accordance with how we dress – and we act in accordance with how we feel. In other words, we are what we wear. The Hall of Fame running back Deion Sanders was speaking a scientifically validated Torah truth when he said: “If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you play well. If you play well, they pay well.”

President Zelensky wore to the Oval Office his customary attire – a black tactical sweatshirt and slacks, that he says embody military dress. It is understandable, from the Biblical Rebecca’s perspective, why he would want to dress like a soldier when commanding a fight. But he did not come to the Oval Office as a military leader commanding a battle. He came as a diplomat seeking to strengthen an alliance. Dressed as a soldier while in a diplomatic role, it is not surprising that he was combative in an environment that called for tact, discretion, linguistic precision and attitudinal nuance.

The Torah’s teaching on clothing, with its relevance to Friday’s meeting, is not done with its lesson that we are what we wear. In Exodus 28, we read about the command to make special garments for the priest — “for honor and glory.” Regardless of how the priests feel in these clothes, they are to wear them when performing their sacred work. Why? Because the clothing isn’t just about them. It is about honoring the place they are in– the holy temple.

By dressing as he always does, President Zelensky conveyed that he did not believe the Oval Office to be a deeply special place – as in being distinguished from all others. If he had broken from his custom of wearing tactical clothing to wear a suit and tie, he would have conveyed a belief that the Oval Office is a place of “honor and glory” — a truth that would have certainly been appreciated by his American hosts.

Recognize Your Place

The Mishna in Pirkei Avot enumerates the 48 qualities necessary for acquiring true wisdom. One of them is: “recognizing your place.” What might this be? Perhaps the custom of the sages recorded in the Talmud to always “Open with the honor of the hosts.”

Honoring a host, of course, means not embarrassing him. This might seem obvious, but it’s not. The imperative to avoid publicly embarrassing someone is an imperative in the Torah tradition – which considers humiliating someone in public to be an unforgivable sin akin to murder (in both cases, the person turns pale).

Honoring a host also means expressing gratitude to the host. How much gratitude should one express? We learn the answer from God and Moses, early in the plague sequence in Exodus. God tells Moses to tell Aaron to strike the river – which will initiate the first plague (the river turning to blood). Why does God want Aaron to do this? When Moses was a baby boy, he was condemned to death like all Jewish infants. His mother and sister put him in a basket, and floated him down the Nile. He floated smoothly until he was found by the benevolent daughter of Pharaoh. Therefore, the Torah tradition tells us, Moses owed the river a debt of gratitude.

How could Moses owe gratitude to a river – which of course does not think or decide, sacrifice or demonstrate courage? That, the Torah tradition instructs us, is the point. If Moses owed gratitude to a river, how much more so do we owe gratitude to those people who do right by us? Gratitude should be expressed frequently, generously and robustly.

This should have been easy for President Zelensky. He could have resolved not to try to “beat” the President and Vice-President in arguments, and “catch” them especially in front of viewers the world over. What, alternatively, could he have said? Maybe something like this:

President Lincoln called the United States, “the last best hope on earth.” Eight score and three years later, we know just how enduring the words of that great American leader were. The United States, often led by great men like President Trump, has long been the definer, developer and protector of liberty throughout the world. It is only because of your strength – as seen by the greatness of your people, the conviction of your leaders, the might of your armed forces and the wisdom of your diplomats – that people the world over yearning for freedom have a shot at it. We are not the first, and we will not be the last, beneficiaries of the great arsenal of democracy – God’s guarantor of freedom – that your great nation is. We can only strive to be the best. We Ukrainians are deeply grateful – certainly beyond what I can express in my broken English and even beyond the feelings that well in my heart – to be your loyal partner and protected friend. As we, hopefully, prepare to move beyond war and to peace – we are grateful to be able to do so guided by your wisdom and supported by your power, in the confidence that we can be your friend in freedom and against tyranny now and forever.

President Zelensky could have maintained the tone and the spirit throughout the public aspects of the meeting. It would have afforded him the opportunity to have more nuanced discussions in the lunch that was to follow the meeting, in which he could have made his case vigorously. Instead, President Zelensky was argumentative, in his words and as much with his body language. He tried to intellectually corner his hosts, even using at least one strange cross between a hypothetical and a threat (Russia will cross the ocean and come for you) that would have been shot down in a college dorm debate that his discussion resembled – and never would have resonated with his host. He lost all sense of strategic focus.

The result was a strategic catastrophe for his country and his cause. It is now up to him and his allies to determine whether he is the right man to continue to lead Ukraine – and, regardless, how Ukraine can repair a badly damaged relationship.

The Torah, as ever, offers plenty of guidance there as well.