Jewish leadership has always been vital to our existence. To form a people and a monotheistic faith, we needed upstanding spiritual leaders who were also change agents. To form a nation, we needed governance, laws, a home for the Divine Presence, and a story that inspired. To make history, we needed an enduring set of universal principles that could inflfluence generations. To endure for millennia, we needed to hand tradition down through a chain of leadership succession.