Heroes

Heroes.

I think about the people that I admire and look up. Are they real or are they fiction? Are they characters in a story? Fact, fantasy, fiction?

I think about them and I know who they are. They are real people with real lives and real challenges.

I am at a birth and in the midst of the peak of a woman’s pain she turns to me, removes herself from her personal pain and asks me the names of the wounded so that she can pray for them. She’s my hero.

No, she’s not a movie star, nor a model. She’s not an imaginary character of a princess, a mermaid or a mouse. She’s a normal Jewish woman having a baby and it’s hard. Life is difficult. She’s not perfect, nor does she have to pretend to be (even though unfortunately she does feel the pressure to be so) and this, this woman is my hero.

She’s a person who gets hurt or insulted and she doesn’t ignore that it didn’t happen. Yes, she allows herself to feel the pain, but then do you know what she does about it? She accepts. Accepts what? Accepts that there are things that she can’t control or change. Accepts that she can’t go back and change the past, but that she can do whatever it takes to stay focused in the present. She commits to living her life to the fullest. She accepts that there are things which she can’t fix and that it’s okay.

She accepts that neither she, nor he, nor anyone else is perfect and that’s okay.

This, this woman is alive, no matter in what physical state and this, this woman is my hero.

She cares about others; she feels their pain. This, this makes her my hero.

My heroes are women who say, “I don’t know.” Or “I made a mistake.” “I am doing the best that I can with these circumstances.”

Yosef, like all of our patriarchs and matriarchs, he is my hero. Yes, he was a holy man on a very very high level, and he also was a real person with real problems and challenges. Real people do real things like make mistakes. For me, his piety and modesty isn’t so much what makes him my personal hero. No, it was his humanness and his capacity to accept and live in the present. Nowhere does it say that he forgave the terrible action of what his brothers did to him, but he accepted and he grew from it. He chose to know that it was for a reason, even if at first the reason was concealed to him.

Word was brought back to his father, “Yosef is alive (Bereishit 45:26).” Yes, Yosef was alive. Life, is connection. Yosef, never stopped connecting or living in the present. Yosef held onto his faith and held onto the fact that God was in the picture.

A person can be physically living and walking around disconnected and with so much pain and anger that they are dead. Yosef didn’t hold onto anger, pain, frustration. Yosef was alive. A real person with a real family. With real interactions with others, a real hero.

May we be blessed to have real heroes in our lives.

Shabbat Shalom,

Elana