Emes – Yiddish for “truth,” which also happens to be my name
Emmet Hirsch is a researcher and obstetrician-gynecologist in Evanston, Illinois. In his creative writing, he seeks meaning in a fact-based world.
Flawed Heroes
This past Saturday was the 53rd anniversary of my bar mitzvah. As I did when I was 13, I chanted the weekly reading from the Prophets (“the haftarah”) before the congregation. In gentle acknowledgement of the occasion, the prayer leader summoned me to the pulpit with the traditional call for “The Bar Mitzvah Boy.”
The reading is taken from Chapter 13 of Judges, the seventh book of the Bible. It tells the origin story of Samson, whose birth is foretold by an angel. The child is destined for greatness, the angel tells Samson’s mother, for he will begin the process of delivering Israel from oppression by the Philistines. She is cautioned that her son must never cut his hair.
The prophecy comes true. Samson contended with the Philistines his entire adult life. Endowed with super-human strength, he performed remarkable feats. He ripped a lion in two with his bare hands. He single-handedly defeated a Philistine army of a thousand men while armed with nothing more than the jawbone of a donkey.
Despite these achievements, Samson is almost the antithesis of a “nice Jewish boy.” He is neither pious nor scholarly. He shuns community. He is drawn to self-destructive pleasures and brutish behavior. He consorts with a series of non-Israelite women, one of whom, Delilah, betrays him to his enemies.
In the end, shorn of his hair, feeble and blinded by his captors, the once-mighty hero of Israel is drawn from the dungeons and made to dance before the masses in the Temple of the Philistine god Dagon. In Judges 16:28-30, Samson calls upon God: “Remember me and give me strength just this once . . . and he leaned against [the pillars] . . . and Samson cried out, May my soul perish with the Philistines! and the temple came crashing down on the lords and on all the people therein.”
The Hebrew Bible is written so concisely that no word of it seems unintentional. Why did its compilers choose to devote such a large section of text to such a morally ambiguous personage? Perhaps to bring home the point that there are no perfect people, no matter how deserving they may be of admiration. Indeed, the Bible seems determined to air the character flaws of even its greatest heroes; none emerges from the narrative untarnished. I have kept this in mind while contemplating my own heroes. Thomas Jefferson was somehow able to pen the immortal declaration “all men are created equal” while enslaving people. I cannot pardon this ruthless hypocrisy, nor can it be justified by the norms of his time. Winston Churchill, savior of Western civilization, was an imperialist, a racist, abusive toward people close to him, and responsible for colossal blunders that led to the deaths of thousands.
It seems to me that the more a person achieves in the public sphere, the more difficult it is to remain unsullied (and for the truly, historically great, I believe it is impossible).
Most of us are not Samson, or Jefferson, or Churchill, or Cesar Chavez, or Steve Jobs, or Martin Luther King, Jr. But the fact that our achievements occur on a more modest scale than those of the giants of history does not immunize us against forces that challenge our morals. We “regular people” have no choice but to try to do the best we can.
These thoughts occupied me as I developed the character of the flawed protagonist of my novel The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb. Through the means of what I hope is a well-crafted and thrilling story, the central conflict presented in this tale is whether Joseph Friedmann can overcome the destructive imprints of a traumatic childhood. He struggles to discover the goodness hidden within a life of betrayal and deceit, ultimately risking everything in the hope that his quest might somehow lead to redemption.
Wishing for redemption for us all, I remain,
Emmet Hirsch
The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb can be found in paperback, hardcover, e-book and audiobook formats at most places online where books are sold. You can ask your library or bookstore to carry it.
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