The Extraordinary in the Ordinary
Real heroes often arrive in shabby shoes
I recall standing opposite an exceedingly ordinary looking frail old man one morning many years ago. We were both sorting apples on either side of a conveyor belt in an apple factory on a Kibbutz in Northern Israel.
Given his advanced age, I wondered whether he might be one of the founders of this now thriving settlement on the foothills of the Golan Heights.
In the months since I had arrived as a twenty-year-old Kibbutz volunteer, I had developed a genuine respect for these old settlers. Most of them had escaped Europe because of the Holocaust, and more than a few had the tattoos of the Nazi death camps imprinted on their skin.
Impressively, they had banded together to form a collective. They then literally cleared and cultivated what had been a barren piece of rocky land with little more than their bare hands. All this while coming under regular artillery fire from the Syrian border, which was just a stone’s throw away from where they were attempting to create their new home.
But there was nothing apparently extraordinary about this old man. He was decidedly ordinary. Perhaps made more so by the circumstances of our work. Or maybe it was the faded old blue flannel clothes he wore, or his shabby shoes, which seemed to be nearly as old as he was himself.
If I picked up any signs at all, it was the gentleness and kindness in his eyes, and his soft-spoken manner, as we chatted back and forth across that conveyer belt. When our shift was done, he left me in the same unassuming way that seemed to define everything about him. A small wise smile, a sparkle in his eyes, and the expressed hope “that we might meet and talk again.”
— But we never did.
Later that day, one of the younger members of the Kibbutz who had become a friend asked if I knew who the old man was that I had been speaking to that morning? Turns out he was one of Israel’s most famous sons. An Army General and widely acclaimed war hero. He was a household name in Israel and spoken of in the most revered and respectful terms by one and all.
My young friend explained that though his income as a decorated Army General could have allowed him to live a lavage lifestyle in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, he had instead always returned to the simple life, as one among many without status or acclaim, on the Kibbutz. He was a true believer in the communal way of living and gave his entire income over to the commune collective that he had helped to build.
I am now a well-aged man myself. As I ponder some of the extraordinary people I’ve met in my life, he ranks high as a hero. I don’t know much about his war record. But I remember the kind eyed, soft-spoken man, in the shabby shoes and faded flannel clothes who showed me what an authentic hero who practiced radical renunciation writ large, and self-sacrificing, other-centered love, could look like!
The extraordinary is in the ordinary, comrades! The real heroes in this life often arrive in shabby shoes.
— Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart
