The Tanach's Rugged Individualists

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
–Robert Frost

While there are aspects of my American background that I have tried to distance myself from, I am grateful to America for instilling in me my fierce individualism. I was raised on Frost’s famous line of taking the road less traveled, and have lived in enough other places to know this is an almost uniquely American value.

Certainly, one can see good reasons to reject Frost’s less-traveled road. In fact, the vast majority of Americans also reject it in practice, if not necessarily in theory. For, far more often than not, the difference that road creates is loneliness, frustration and ineffectiveness. And yet it is a road that resonates with the Jewish tradition.

One reason for the Diaspora was for the Jewish people to absorb certain values that found stronger expression in other cultures (while obviously withstanding and rejecting more noxious ones). Some understand this as the kabbalistic idea of gathering the sparks of holiness that have been lost to the Jewish people.

One test of whether such a “foreign” value is truly holy is to try to plug it back into our understanding of Judaism’s core texts and practices. And, indeed, when I come to the parshiot at the beginning of Bereishit, I cannot help but see two outstanding rugged individualists who truly took the road less traveled. Yet in the case of Noach, I am not sure if it made all the difference. That Noach’s story is followed so quickly by the Torah’s other great individualist, Avraham, is often seen as a corrective to the first story. I believe it can be seen that way when it comes to individualism as well.

To be clear, Noach deserves at least as much credit for going against the tide of idolatry and immorality as Avraham. It is extremely challenging to go it alone. Even if it may have been clear to both men that theirs was the only way to assure any type of future, the isolation and opposition they must have encountered (as explored in many Midrashim) would have brought down anyone lacking the legendary fortitude of these two heroes. It is really even worse. The challenge of individualism turns into near absurdity when absolutely everyone else is going in the opposite direction. (In both generations, a very few others also resisted, but they were older, so they could easily be relegated as eccentric old-timers clinging to antiquated values.)

Yet, at the end of the day, Noach’s individualism was only enough to save himself and his family. That is why we have to read further before making a judgment about the virtue of individualism. We will need to compare Noach’s story to the next one of Avraham to understand that individualism can only be the first step. That is because individualism is really only a defensive strategy. And in the case of an individual, defending oneself is not enough. Or as Hillel taught us, “If I am only for myself, what am I?”

Avraham understood that he had to eventually go on the offensive and take the values he had correctly formulated in isolation back to a society that would continue to fight against them. He presumably knew he could not be totally victorious in his own time. But by being even a little victorious and winning over a few individuals (the proverbial souls that he and Sarah made in Charan), he would be able to create the beginnings of a movement that would one day be completely victorious and thereby, more immediately, give G-d a reason to continue sustaining the world, since it would now be a world with a future.

Of course, such a comparison may not be entirely fair to Noach. Who is to say that he had the tools to win people over? Moreover, were the people of his time as ready and able to listen as were the people living in the time of Avraham, who already knew about G-d’s earlier destruction of the world with the flood? This could well be the point of dispute Rashi famously cites at the beginning of Parshat Noach regarding the relationship between Noach’s imperfect righteousness and the limits created by the abysmal generation he was living in.

The point of the comparison of these two great men, however, is really not about who was better; it is about what we can take away from each. In that sense, while both can teach us that individualism is an important defensive strategy, the difference between the two teaches us that it can only be a first step. That is to say, we can agree with Frost’s teaching that the less-traveled road can make all the difference, but only if we show it to others.