Dr. Li Wenliang was a 34-year-old ophthalmologist in Wuhan, a large city (11 million inhabitants) that had been relatively unknown to the world beyond China. He, along with his native city, might have continued to live with the blessings of obscurity were it not for the coronavirus that is now an epidemic in China and may soon become a global pandemic. Dr. Li was the first person to try to warn others about the dangers of the disease. The Chinese government, trying to suppress word of the illness, forced him to sign a “confession” denouncing his prior warning as an unfounded rumor. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Li contracted the disease, and died.
Dr. Li quickly became a hero in China, for several reasons:
- He rang the alarm about the disease, when no one else did so.
- The government clamped down on his efforts to do his duty as a medical profession. They succeeded in the short term, forcing Dr. Li to retract his warning in public; but the disease spread so quickly that it soon became clear that Dr. Li was in fact correct.
- His work on behalf of coronavirus patients caused him to contract the disease as well and to die shortly thereafter. While his death in itself may not have been enough to have turned him into a hero, following as it did 1 and 2, it put paid to the lie that the Chinese government tried to propagate and rendered him a kind of martyr following the shameful ordeal they put him through.
What makes a hero? Is it the hero’s time or character, historical circumstances or particular genius? Jewish tradition clearly favors character as the determining factor, but the Torah itself allows for conflicting interpretations on this score.
“Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation” (Genesis 6:9). The Rabbis of the Talmud were divided on how to interpret this sentence. Some reckoned that had Noah lived in a righteous generation, he too would have been numbered among the righteous; others argue the opposite, that Noah was righteous in his generation, when standards were at an all-time low.
But the verse can also be interpreted as saying that the generation set boundaries for the expression of Noah’s character. The challenges Noah faced and met—building the ark, ushering in the species—were much more straightforward than the challenges that Abraham confronted. Would Lincoln be remembered as a great president if he had ruled at the time of Warren Harding or Herbert Hoover?
What the verse may indicate is that time + character = heroism. A great hero is someone who succeeds in a time fraught with great conflict—someone who rises to the occasion, and is given the occasion to rise. Moreover, the features of the hero’s character must be the right ones to face the challenges of the times. Landed at a time and location ill-matched to his or her temperament, a person with heroic qualities will not succeed. Using Lincoln again as an example, it’s doubtful that he would have been the right leader during the time of Washington.
Let’s return to poor Dr. Li. Clearly, a cluster of circumstances lay behind his status as a hero. He lived in Wuhan in 2019-20, was a doctor, was employed at the hospital where the first coronavirus patients were arriving. Very few other people were likely in position to take the action that he did. His timing and location were impeccable, and without them, he surely never would have had the opportunity to become known and admired among the wider public.
And yet, clearly his character did make a difference. He did decide to alert medical colleagues in other locations that the Wuhan hospital was under quarantine, that patients were showing signs similar to SARS of a deadly epidemic. He wound up suffering for making that choice. There are questions, perhaps, surrounding his heroic status: Was he aware that he was going against the will of the government by spreading word of the disease? Would most other doctors in China have acted similarly, prioritizing their Hippocratic oath over their loyalty to the government? What pressure did the government bring to force his fake confession? Is it conceivable that he might have refused, and what penalties would have been inflicted then?
But likely none of that matters to his countrymen. To them, he is a hero for speaking the truth and trying to save others, in the face of a government that tried to muzzle the truth, even if many people would die for that suppression.