[Avodah] How the Torah portrays our great men

[Yitzchok Levine]

The following is from the new translation of the 
commentary of Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch on 
Bereishis 12: 10 - 13. He is discussing the 
question of how Avraham could leave EY and put Sarah in danger.

In light of this, I have to wonder why some think 
that all "negatives" about our predecessors 
should be suppressed. What I am talking about is 
the tendency of some to go so far as to deny that 
certain things took place in the past if they do 
not jive with our present view of what the 
religious world should look like.  As I have 
quipped more than once, "There are Holocaust 
deniers and there are Orthodox deniers."

YL

RSRH quotes the Ramban “Our father Avraham inadvertently committed
a grave sin by placing his virtuous wife before a stumbling block
of iniquity because of his fear of being killed . . . His leaving the Land,
about which he had been commanded, because of the famine was another
sin he committed” — nevertheless, none of this
would perplex us.

The Torah does not seek to portray our great men
as perfectly ideal figures; it deifies no man. It says of no one: “Here you
have the ideal; in this man the Divine assumes human form!” It does
not set before us the life of any one person as the model from which
we might learn what is good and right, what we must do and what we
must refrain from doing. When the Torah wishes to put before us a
model to emulate, it does not present a man, who is born of dust.
Rather, God presents Himself as the model, saying: “Look upon Me!
Emulate Me! Walk in My ways!” We are never to say: “This must be
good and right, because so-and-so did it.” The Torah is not an “anthology
of good deeds.” It relates events not because they are necessarily
worthy of emulation, but because they took place.

The Torah does not hide from us the faults, errors, and weaknesses
of our great men, and this is precisely what gives its stories credibility.
The knowledge given us of their faults and weaknesses does not detract
from the stature of our great men; on the contrary, it adds to their
stature and makes their life stories even more instructive. Had they
been portrayed to us as shining models of perfection, flawless and
unblemished, we would have assumed that they had been endowed
with a higher nature, not given to us to attain. Had they been portrayed
free of passions and inner conflicts, their virtues would have seemed
to us as merely the consequence of their loftier nature, not acquired
by personal merit, and certainly no model we could ever hope to
emulate. 
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