A leader hesitates before a donor conversation.
Not because the project lacks importance.
But something else is happening.
Inside, a quieter question:
Am I really 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.
It appears more often than leaders realize.
In November 1941, the world was at war.
England lived under the threat of Nazi invasion.
Food was rationed.
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 was not yet there.
And yet he went out and asked for support
Eighty years later we see what that vision created.
An institution that shaped generations.
That pattern appears often in Jewish leadership.
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.
Over the years I have seen something similar inside many mosdos.
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.
Leaders assume their challenge is convincing donors.
But the deeper question usually sits somewhere else:
Am I really the person who should be asking for this
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.
When that internal shift happens, conversations change.
Donors sense it immediately.
The organization is no longer speaking with hesitation.
It is speaking with responsibility
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 only a Torah idea. It is also a leadership pattern.
In unstable moments, responsibility does not wait for perfect readiness.
Responsibility chooses those who step forward.
I see this pattern in many mosdos.
The moment a leader quietly accepts that the responsibility truly sits with them, something changes.
The organization begins to move differently.
© 2026 Avraham Lewis & Co.