How being an underdog can work in your favor

“A

gainst all odds” is a phrase often associated with the underdog. When we witness his surprising success, we slap him on the back and cheer him on for his grit and determination in the face of near-certain defeat.

Perhaps the most classic victory of an underdog is that of Dovid’s victory over Golias.

The armies of Klal Yisrael and the Pelishtim are at a military impasse in the Valley of Elah. The Pelishtim suggest a battle with a single combatant instead — your best against our best. They send 12-foot-tall Golias, wearing his magnificent full-body armor. No Jewish soldier steps forward to battle him.

Dovid has been sent by his father to bring food to his three soldier brothers and hears Golias’s taunts. He volunteers to fight him. Shaul Hamelech warns him that he’s but a youngster, while Golias is a seasoned man of war. But Dovid insists, and Shaul attempts to gird him for battle with sword and armor. But Dovid shrugs him off, saying he’s uncomfortable in them.

The slight boy trots out, shepherd’s staff in one hand and slingshot in the other. He tells Golias, “You come to me with a sword, spear, and javelin, but I come to you with the Name of Hashem,” and he picks up five stones from the valley floor and fits one into his slingshot. Then — bull’s eye — he hits Golias on the forehead and knocks him unconscious. Dovid runs up to the felled body and cuts off the head with his foe’s own sword.

Dovid Hamelech was no stranger to hardship. As we know from the Midrash, Dovid’s father believed him to be a mamzer and relegated him to distant fields with the sheep. When Shmuel came to anoint one of the sons of Yishai, they didn’t even consider recalling him from tending the flock.

But those years of isolation, a boy alone with his sheep, forced Dovid to develop certain skills. In those times, Eretz Yisrael was home to many predators. How could a youngster protect himself and his wooly charges? With a slingshot.

Because Dovid Hamelech was, in essence, an outsider, he may not have been bound by the “rules” that penned in everyone else. He sees a massive Philistine taunting his people, and, like Chushim, the deaf son of Dan who beheaded Eisav for his insolence, Dovid acted.

There was no ceremonial donning of armor, no following of typical battle protocol. Dovid, who wasn’t formally trained in warfare, did battle his own way. Dovid had to change the rules of battle because he didn’t have a hope of overcoming Golias if he followed protocol. He was not predisposed to those rules because he was not part of the system in the first place.

In his book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell, a noted secular writer, uses this incident with Dovid and Golias as a springboard for his theory that sometimes being in an underdog position and outsider actually works in one’s favor.