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February 9, 2001/Shevet 16, 5761, Vol. 53, No.19
Don't yield to this temptation
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
Love is in the air, romance may be just around the corner, and temptation is just an episode away.
I'll gladly trade a home-cooked meal and a good bottle of wine this Wednesday night for another evening of "Temptation Island," Fox TV's latest attempt to pander to our basest instincts.
Not even a sinfully rich dessert could lessen my distaste for the insipid show with its noisome premise. A group of so-called committed couples are ensconced on a romantic Caribbean island with a bevy of attractive singles whose mission is to entice them to cheat on their partners.
Mindless? Uh-huh.
But popular. Wildly so. The show, the latest in the new "reality" prime time offerings, reported an audience of almost 17 million for its first three episodes.
Worrisome. You bet, for anyone concerned about the message the show conveys and the impressionable audience it attracts.
The easiest remedy is simply to tune out and try to dent those daunting ratings. Or voice your displeasure with an angry letter to Fox execs or its advertisers who are scooping up all those lucrative commercial spots.
Better yet, give some serious thought to what we can do as families and communities to send positive messages to our children about loving and being loved.
I'm not suggesting yet another parental plea for abstinence, or a detailed explanation of safe sex. No, I'm thinking of something with a little more feeling and a lot more substance - something our kids can hold onto, something that may reveal to them the amazing relevancy of Jewish thought to their lives.
Something like the Jewish position on sex.
Our tradition is rich with the language and imagery of love. The beautiful "Song of Songs" is the ultimate love poem, and there is a whole body of rabbinic literature devoted to human sexuality and intimacy. The rabbis were not shy, even by today's standards. But they infused their discussion of sexuality with enduring Jewish values: respect, honesty, mutuality.
Even though the Hebrew Bible, with its cast of very human characters, has its share of illicit trysts as well as devoted unions, there is an underlying aversion towards the casual hook-up, the island temptation.
Our children deserve more than tawdry televised images that make love a game and sex a competition. Surely they deserve to understand the beauty of what many of their parents have created and what they can hope to have for themselves.
And they deserve to hear it not only at home, but from the pulpit and in the day school or Hebrew school classroom, from their rabbis and teachers, those who know what the tradition says and can engage them in open, honest discussions of relationships.
There is a temptation to avoid such encounters. Perhaps it is too embarrassing; perhaps too provocative; perhaps too personal. But unless we initiate dialogue with our children, we lose the opportunity to guide them and to expose them to the potential Judaism offers for helping them deal with life's conundrums.
Thirty years after the sexual revolution, we are still tempted to abscond to a desert island and stick our heads in the sand.
It's a temptation we can no longer afford.
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