Every night at 7 pm, I stand on our balcony and join my fellow New Yorkers in cheering on the health workers who are striving to save the lives of COVID19 patients. I imagine that few doctors and nurses expected to be on the front lines of a pandemic when they signed up for school; they did not expect to put their lives at risk when showing up to work, nor to be overwhelmed by a disease and forced to make triage decisions like medics on a battlefield. They did not anticipate that they would worry for lack of proper protective gear for themselves and of necessary medical supplies for their patients. And yet they show up every day, hundreds of local medical staff, bolstered by volunteers from out of town, retirees who returned to the fray, students and residents suddenly fast-tracked to fight the pandemic.
These are, of course, only the most visible of the heroes, who are witnessing the devastation that the rest of us only hear about through statistics or death notices. So many others are also facing substantial risk in their work. In the hospitals themselves, there are social workers supporting the medical workers while others tend to the families of the ill, janitors continuously cleaning surfaces of germs, EMT providers, lab technicians, guards, and many more who are working hard, at long hours and under great stress and emotional trauma.
Outside of hospitals, all of the workers on the food chain, from farmers and factory workers to truckers and supermarket employees, expose themselves daily and have been hit by the virus. Policemen are especially vulnerable, facing an unseen threat unlike any they are used to. People who care for the elderly, whether in nursing homes or as home health aids; Amazon workers and package deliverers; prison staff and others put their lives in danger for their employment.
We all, rightly, consider these folks as heroes, our contemporary equivalent of soldiers in battle or the firemen who saved many lives, and lost many of their own lives, on 9/11. Yet it’s worth pausing to acknowledge how remarkable it is that we do–that we are able to assign the category of “hero” to vast categories of people, huge swaths of our contemporaries. For most of human history, the “hero” was singular, a figure (usually male) who stood at the top of his society, towering above everyone else by virtue of being the monarch, being half-divine, leading his troops to victory. The hero is Alexander, Achilles, Caesar, Napoleon, not their armies and certainly not their nurses.
In The Biblical Hero, I argue that the Bible established a cultural universe in which far more people, and different kinds of people, could potentially be regarded as heroes. The Bible’s monotheistic perspective toppled the pretensions of ancient heroes to be semi-deities. In so doing, it opened the field for other potential candidates, “mere mortals” without claims to perfection, to show their worth and rise to the occasion. The new heroes could include shepherds and prophetesses, kings and queens, housewives and tricksters, sinners and … the less sinful. Perhaps most importantly, heroes could now include the named and anonymous, the leader and followers.
So as we stand on our balconies clapping, whooping and banging, let’s give thanks to today’s biblical-style heroes, the ones whom we know personally, those whose names we know, and the countless others we don’t know but to whom we owe so much.