Shabbat Bo
Written by Charley Baginsky Tuesday, 30 January 2007
I have to admit that I like television, I am a sucker for dramas, cooking shows (even though I can not even boil an egg), soaps and even for the occasional reality show.
I have very little time these days, as I am sure everyone here can sympathise with, to indulge in television and therefore the television I watch is either very carefully selected or else whatever happens to be on when at the end of a long day as I throw myself on the couch too exhausted to move, let alone read anything. This has meant that I have barely seen any Big Brother, but that said, in the last few days none of us have been able to escape it.
The events of Big Brother have infiltrated our screens even without our having to turn to channel four. I am sure those of you who have never felt the need to tune into a reality show have been confronted with it. Wherever we have looked there it has been, filling the newspapers, radio and the television. Politicians all round the world have been talking about it. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron have felt the need to respond, especially Gordon Brown believing it was necessary in order to save our relations with India. It was the leading item on Question Time on Thursday night and the leading item on the morning’s news. Why? What has caused so many people to develop such strong views about a programme that many would never have watched prior to these incidents?
We might be all mature, responsible and moral rabbinic students, but I think even we can understand that there is something addictive about watching people trapped together in a house, forced to perform and interact, human animals in a zoo. Most people, whether they admit it or not, have a voyeuristic part of themselves, a part that wonders what goes on behind their neighbours curtains, and here is a show that caters to that inner part of ourselves. As the critics knock the show and those z list celebrities that have chosen to enter it, one wonders if their vehemence comes from their desire to quash their own secret wishes to peep through the key hole. But in the last few days we have witnessed something new, I am not convinced that the behaviour of Jade Goody and her companions is any more depraved than other behaviour we have seen before on this show, but this time it has been too loud and too vocal and carried out by the so-called famous, that it cannot be ignored, shoed under the carpet as “just the behaviour caused by the tense and stressful environment”.
Is it racism? Many say that Jade as a child of a mixed race relationship can not be a racist, but I wonder if the Indian woman, a Miss Shilpa Shetty, had been Jewish how many of us would be certain it was anti-Semitism if Jade had called her Miss Shilpa Gefilltte fish instead of Shilpa poppadom. After falling off the couch in surprise that Jade would have known what a gefillte fish was, I would have been amongst the crowds convinced that it was Antisemitic. Others argue that Jade is just being nasty and that she is not intelligent enough to be able to understand that she is being racist; however, I am not sure that ignorance is innocence. Indeed, I am sure that even Jade could understand that referring to Shilpa as “the Indian” was not the most sensitive and friendly of gestures. Had she constantly been referred to as the Essex girl, one can assume she would have been similarly affronted. As would have we, if a member of the cast had been known for days simply as “The Jew”.
It is not without irony when we are faced with a story in the news about the bullying and abuse of someone through turning them into a nameless object to be ridiculed that we are in the book of Shemot, names, and that there one finds much namelessness especially in its initial chapters. The Israelites were oppressed for a Pharaoh had arisen who did not know Joseph and his family. They become a nameless other and the Egyptians find it easy to perceive them as slaves and oppress them. And the Israelites then witness the death of nameless children, all brought together under the definition “firstborn”. Followed by those “Egyptians” who die in the sea, nameless/ The death of one nation to free another.
When events like these come so close together one can either see the differences between them or one can see the things that bind them. We can see them as their first born and our first born, or we can see them all as innocent children who died at the hands of oppression, at the hands of people too caught up in their own beliefs to see the damage being done. But what is more, we have a distinct ability to ignore what we suspect to be true until we are forced to watch it happen. Pharaoh did not want to let the people go and worship their God in the desert. He suspected awful things would occur and hardened his heart towards them, but they did come and each time he was made to watch the events as they happened, damaging his land, his crops and livestock, his people and finally his own family.
But we too are guilty. We can see this as a story with a message for others and not for ourselves. We can look at Big Brother and say I would never behave like that I would never get caught up in the group that is bullying another. I would like to think that none of us would. But are we also so confident that we would also be unlike the housemates that sit watching the events unfurl, neither the bully nor the bullied. They watch, like us voyeurs, they whisper “It’s wrong, it’s wrong” and say nothing out loud. Too scared for their careers to stand up and be counted?
In a comment in the Guardian this week, journalist Mark Lawson suggested that what we have witnessed happening in the Big Brother house has done us a favour, for it has made us face up to what is happening in most pubs and clubs across the country, people whispering bigoted, racist and no doubt antisemitic things to each other in corners. I cannot help but agree. The number of times I hear children insult each other with the phrase, “that’s so gay”, the number of time I hear racist terms as I take the train or sit having coffee in a coffee shop, the number of times people make comments to me about everyone they think is different to me and them, sometimes not realising I am not like them either, being Jewish for starters, it is amazing and all too often we let it go unchallenged. Indeed people wanted a reality show and they got a reality show. Now that it is reflecting some of the unpleasant aspects of reality they just want it to go away.
The roots of these prejudices and others, the ones we hold and the ones that people hold against us, are deeply embedded in our consciousness. We walk through life judging others all the time on their religion, race, colour, clothes, habits, dress, etc. We need to call ourselves and others to account and realise that letting racism, bullying and discrimination slide is just not good enough. Another timing irony perhaps is that last week as the racism accusations flooded the BB House the United States commemorated Martin Luther King Day. Reading a little more about this day I came across a statement written by those Rabbis and lay leaders who marched with Dr King and were beaten and jailed with him in the South. They talk of how their identity had been formed by the Exodus, which taught them that the oppression of anyone was also their oppression:
Each of us has in this experience become a little more the person, a bit more the rabbi he always hoped to be but has not yet been able to become. We believe in [humanity's] ability to fulfill God's commands with God's help. We make no messianic estimate of our power and certainly not of what we did here. But it has reaffirmed our faith in the significance of the deed.... We came to stand with our brothers and in the process have learned more about ourselves and our God.... He has guided, sustained, and strengthened us in a way we could not manage on our own...
Baruch Ata Adonai, matir assurim, Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who freest the captives. Mark Lawson ended his article with the thought that “the experience will only have any meaning if enough members of the publicity-inflated audience are taught by this affair to watch their own thoughts and words. Editing television is useless unless our culture can somehow sincerely make the same cuts.” Perhaps the same is true for us every time we read about the Exodus, as much as every time we tune into the BB House, reminding us not to be the voyeurs but rather the protagonists for change.
