Three Kinds of Heroes

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, December 20, 2008

It’s not that often, that we get a chance to think about Hanukah, not as a family or children’s holiday, but about its meaning for adults.

One theme of the holiday which can have special significance for adults, is the theme of heroism. But to understand that fully, we need to take a step back.

Who are the heroes of the other Jewish holidays?

Think of the High Holidays- Abraham and Isaac are part of the narrative, but are they the heroes? I’m going to suggest, that for the rabbis of the Talmud, who understood heroism in a special way, each of us is invited to be the hero of our own High Holidays.

Think of Passover, where it might be so natural to see this as a celebration of Moses and about how our tradition goes out of its way in the Haggadah, not to make Moses the hero of the holiday.

Purim, which is really a post-Toraitic holiday, has human heroes, Mordechai and Esther; though of course the Book of Esther stresses that the greatest hero of Purim is the one behind the scenes.

Chanukah as we’ve mentioned at the beginning of our service, exists in two forms-

one, the festival as described in the books of Maccabbees, with human heroes, the Maccabbees, winning their battles against the Seleucids. In the books of the Maccabbees it is not only Mattathias and Judah, but each of the brothers who has his moment in the sun

and the second, the festival as recreated in the Talmud, in which God is the hero and the central miracle is recast into the miracle of the oil.

In the last 150 years, the Jewish community has reclaimed the earlier version of the Chanukah holiday.

For the Zionist movement, it was a model of their own struggle first against the Turkish Empire and then against the British mandate. They identified very fully with the Maccabees and in their songs and poems will say: “we are the Maccabees”.

For American Jews also, as Hanukah began to compete with another winter festival, this earlier material gave greater substance to the holiday. Having heroes who were victors and not victims, was also important, particularly in the post-Holocaust 1950’s and 60’s.

So let’s focus on this question of heroes.

First, This focus provides a link to our Torah portion this week- Vayeshev.

Vayeshev begins the story of Joseph, who is very much the central player, the hero of the rest of the book of Genesis. Joseph, begins as a dreamer, a young man of ambition and chutzpah, not unlike some of the heroes of our more recent history.

Rabbi Jim Ponet, the chaplain at Yale, compares him to Theodore Herzl, who has the audacity to write, after the first Zionist Congress in 1897: “ At Basle I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in 50 everyone will see it.” And of course the state of Israel was established, 51 years later in 1948.

Some heroes are those with courage in exceptionally dangerous situations. Whether in battle or in rescuing someone from a burning building or raging river, they risk their lives for something they consider of even higher value.

Joshua is presented in the Bible as this sort of hero and the modern state of Israel provides recognition in a variety of ways for this kind of hero. Yonatan Netanyahu, the soldier who fell during the rescue of the hijack victims at Entebbe is this sort of hero along with Joseph Trumpeldorf, at least in the George Washington chopped down the apple tree style telling’s of the establishment of the state of Israel.

There are also non-military heroes in this category, people like Rabbi Marshall Meyer, who was a rabbi in Argentina during the period of the disappeared, and who stood up to the government and American rabbis like Rabbi Jack Rothschild, of Atlanta, who showed courage when his synagogue was bombed in 1958 during the struggle for civil rights.

Another aspect of heroism is to dream dreams and to work them into reality. This can be national dreams like that of Theodore Herzl, who we mentioned before, but also more personal dreams.

I think here of some of Danny Siegel’s mitzvah heroes, people like Jay Feinberg, who out of his personal need for a bone marrow transplant created a national registry for bone marrow donors, and Kathy Levin, a pioneer in bringing together seriously declining elders with everyday teenagers and young people. This is the kind of hero that Robert Kennedy described saying: “Few of us will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.”

Finally, there is the kind of heroism which the rabbis of the Talmud celebrated, which was self- mastery. “Who is mighty?” they ask. “ The one who conquers their own impulses.”

The Jewish philosopher Yehsyahu Leibowitz described it in this way:

“Heroism is always linked with the struggle between a man’s choice of values which is conscious and which he decides to exercise, and an urge arising from his nature and operating within him without his knowledge and even against his will.”

For Leibowitz and for the rabbis, there is heroism in resisting temptation. There is also heroism in what one historian writing about the Jewish people called “obstinate toughness.” in being able to stick to what you believe in despite pressures and enticements. Related to this, there is heroism, in being able to overcome one’s own ego, judge oneself wanting and commit to change.

Sydney Harris a political philosopher weighs in on that aspect of self-mastery. He said:

“I am tired of hearing about men with the courage of their convictions. Nero and Caliguila, Attila and Hitler, had the courage of their convictions. .. But not one of them had the courage to examine their convictions or to change them, which is the true test of character.”

So, I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about these three aspects of heroism:

1. Courage and Self- Sacrifice

2. Vision and Accomplishment

3. Self-Mastery and Self-Criticism

Do you have a personal hero who is an example of one of these types of heroism?

Is there a type of heroism that you feel we need today, more than others?