The Lion's Mane

In the heat of this late summer morning, the deep orange dahlia looks like a ragged lion’s mane. When it was at the peak of its blooming—though I know this only in retrospect—it was, on close inspection, a universe of densely layered petals. It has seen better days, its decline made more emphatic by the late blooming dahlias that surround it, four of them, of the deepest most luminous purple.

By the time I had tried to take him out of his bed this morning in order to strap on his harness—Rocky grows old like I grow old, legs and back a bit stiff, mind a bit fuzzy, our muscled younger years a distant though often vivid memory— he was adamant that he would not, no matter what bribe of a treat I offered him, venture out into the heat of a fiery sun.

In the 16 years of mornings we have shared—apart from those weeks, perhaps in total over the years of a couple of months when I was out of the country—there have been perhaps a dozen mornings when for some reason or other we failed to start our day together, out there along the boardwalk by the bay or in the botanical gardens where we spent our hour of freedom during the pandemic’s darkest days.

So it was that I left him there curled up and sleeping, breathing gentle snores that sounded to me like snores of gratitude because he had not been forced to be compliant with my need for a start to the morning, a start, no matter the heat, that affirmed for me my place in this place where I live.

So it was that I became entranced by the ragged lion’s mane-like orange dahlia, the one that has seen better days, out there by the back fence, the sun mid -morning high and bees, I saw, were burrowing into the dense petals of the purple dahlias which were dazzling but uncomplicated, like everything that is in full bloom.

The petals on the orange dahlia, the lion’s mane, are curling up, folding into themselves, fading towards the end.  The dying dahlia somehow brings the memory of David Grossman’s novel, Lion’s Honey, not considered one of Grossman’s best novels but which I loved and what I particularly loved was his reimagining of Samson, perhaps the least articulate, the least verbal—if not the least intelligent—Jew who ever lived.

And the most unloved, unloved by his mother and father and unloved by the love of his life who was his ultimate betrayer though he never complained about it, not in the bible’s rendering of Samson’s story, nor even in Grossman’s reimagining of Samson’s life.

He was, when you think of it, a very strange Jew, unblessed by God except for his exceptional strength, which in his life he did not always use well or righteously, a strange Jew indeed, silent and uncomplaining, unperturbed by lovelessness and betrayal.

But in the end when he was eyeless in Gaza having had his eyes gouged out by the Philistines who held him captive―and when he was nowhere near as strong as he had once been—the young Samson had famously torn apart a lion with his bare hands and in Grossman’s story had wrapped himself in the lion’s mane ever after―he died in the rubble of the great Philistine temple of Gaza that he brought down by dragging together the temple’s columns, Samson dying there together with his Philistine captors.

I do not mean to suggest that Grossman’s novel was some sort of allegory about the Israel and Hamas war in Gaza. It was written at least a decade ago when even a novelist of Grossman’s brilliance could not have imagined what happened on October 7 last year and its aftermath, this war in Gaza with its horrors and its suffering, its thousands of dead women and children.

And yet when I looked at the orange dahlia and it struck me that it was like a ragged lion’s mane, Samson in Gaza, wearing his lion’s mane came to me. Samson of Grossman’s imagining, Samson unloved even after he had brought down the Philistine temple. Silent Samson powerful enough to bring down a temple full of Philistines but a man opposite in every way to David, that other destroyer of an enemy of the Jews. David who became a hero of the Jewish people for his slaying of Goliath. David who is perhaps the most articulate Jew in history.

These things are never straightforward, these allegorical echoes. All I know is that Grossman’s Samson whose eyes have been gouged out, Samson betrayed by Delilah, eyeless in Gaza, a captive of the Philistines he will ultimately destroy because of his remarkable strength and at the cost of his own life, somehow, in ways that I cannot explain except to say that many things―like looking at the orange dahlia― take me, often unexpectedly, to Israel and Gaza and inside the growing disease of Jew hatred.

David Grossman, as far as I can tell, has been mostly silent after October 7 and during the subsequent months of the war in Gaza. I wonder what that means because he has written brilliantly about Israelis and Palestinians. He has suffered the worst of tragedies a father can suffer. His son Uri was killed by anti-tank fire in southern Lebanon in 2006, days before a ceasefire came into force in the war between Hezbollah and Israel. It did not silence him, not back then. He even wrote a novel at the centre of which was a mother’s desperate attempts to forestall what she long feared, the death of her child.

I wonder were he to now write a version of Lion’s Honey in the aftermath of October 7, would it be a different book? Would Samson’s story still be the story of an unloved and ordinary man who for reasons that only God knows, God chose to give the strength to destroy the enemies of the Jews and then leave him to die unloved and unmourned?

Or would Samson, in Grossman’s retelling of his story, be more like David— not as articulate or heroic— a saviour, a flawed one of course, of the Jews.