A leader hesitates before the donor conversation.
Not because the project lacks importance.
Something else is at play.
Inside, a quieter question:
Am I the person who should be asking for this?
The Rav Dessler Principle.
Leadership responsibility often arrives before the leader accepts it.
Before the confidence is there.
More common than leaders realize.
In November 1941, the world was at war.
England lived under the threat of Nazi invasion, food was rationed, and money was scarce.
And in that moment, Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler founded the Gateshead Kollel.
He traveled each week raising funds for an idea the community barely understood.
A kollel? Married men learning Torah full-time?
For many, it sounded unrealistic, even irresponsible.
Leadership was required before it felt justified.
The responsibility was already his. The clarity had not yet reached others.
And yet he went out and asked for support.
At the time, nothing about it felt inevitable.
Eighty years later, we can see what that vision created.
An institution that shaped generations.
What once sounded improbable becomes obvious in hindsight.
Important institutions rarely begin with universal confidence. They begin with someone willing to carry a vision before others fully understand it.
This is how leadership often begins.
Rav Dessler wrote in Michtav M’Eliyahu:
In wartime, promising candidates are taken from the ranks of ordinary soldiers
and turned into officers in a fraction of the time normally required.So too, in times when capable men are scarce,
anyone willing to tackle a vital problem receives divine assistance.Hashem turns the incapable into successful men,
not because they deserve it,
but because the world needs them.
This is not theoretical. It shows up in leadership.
I see the same pattern inside many mosdos. It is not always fully realized.
Many organizations do not lack support. They lack leadership that has fully accepted the responsibility to ask for it.
Fundraising hesitation isn’t persuasion.
It’s accepting responsibility.
Many leaders feel this before they ever name it.
Many mosdos do not struggle because donors doubt the mission.
They struggle because the leader has not yet accepted the full weight of their role.
Donors sense it immediately.
The organization is no longer speaking with hesitation.
It speaks with responsibility.
The question no longer sounds the same.
© 2026 Avraham Lewis & Co.