Real Role Models

I have had role models who inspired me and then let me down badly when their flaws were exposed. I have also been called a role model myself – which is a deeply uncomfortable thing to be told when you know exactly how flawed you are. That tension is what this piece, and my next book, are about.

A year ago I committed to writing a weekly article on the Jewish Torah portion. It was a significant project, it ran for a full year, and it culminated in a book I published on Amazon a couple of months ago. The year finished yesterday. Today I am starting the next one.

My fifth book will, health permitting, continue the weekly cycle but with a single, specific focus: the role models presented in each week’s reading – from the Torah, the Haftorah, or a Jewish holiday falling that week – and crucially, their flaws as much as their greatness.

Why role models?

It is a topic that has fascinated me for a long time. Not only for the extraordinary influence role models have, but for what happens when the cracks appear – the disappointment, sometimes the devastation, when someone we have placed on a pedestal turns out to be human after all.

The truth is we always knew no one is perfect. The pedestal was our construction, not theirs.

This is precisely what makes the characters of the Bible so compelling. Many of them are unquestionably great – genuine role models across thousands of years. But the Bible does not sanitise them. They are lambasted by G-d, they perform terrible acts, their weaknesses are given full air by the text. They are real. And because they are real, they are actually worth learning from.

The same is true in the secular world. As children we are often taught to think of figures like Churchill, Gandhi, and others in a one-dimensional way. There is no doubt that they were role models to many, including me, but they also had complicated characters and were deeply flawed in other areas. In many ways the fact that they achieved the greatness they did is a testament to their ability to overcome their challenges, or to be so great in other areas that they remained role models despite their failings.

This is not a book for a Jewish audience only. I intend to write it in a way that is accessible to anyone who has ever admired someone, been let down by them, or tried to make sense of both.

A number of people have told me recently – and I will be honest, it is a little embarrassing to write this – that they see me as a role model, for the advocacy work I have been doing and for the way I am dealing with PSP. I want to be honest about something else too. I am a deeply flawed person trying to handle the situation I am in with the skills I have and with the best of intentions. I do not want to be on any pedestal. What I want is to learn from the role models the Torah gives us – their greatness and their failures both.

Why a book?

Not for sales. Not for money. Not for reach – the first four books sold a grand total of 419 copies, which tells its own story. I need a project. I need something that pulls me forward, that gives me a reason to think carefully each week about something that matters. I need a challenge. This is it.

We tend to hold our role models – parents, friends, public figures, biblical characters, bloggers – to a standard of perfection that was never attainable, and then feel betrayed when they fall short of it. The more honest approach is to understand that the flaw is not a disqualification. Often it is the most instructive part. A role model who has struggled, failed, and kept going anyway teaches you something that a perfect one never could.

That is the book I want to write.