by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
If a Martian were to come down to Earth, he would wonder how America has so prospered when it is so consumed with who Jennifer is dating, and whether she has gotten over Brad (that’s Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, in case you live on Mars).
The United States is a living contradiction. On the one hand, education is so important to us that approximately 60 percent of the population has gone to college. On the other hand, we burn our brain cells on the sordid lives of our even more sordid celebrities. The greatest democracy in the world endlessly examines whether Britney is wearing underpants. That we have allowed ourselves to devolve into such inanity is a national tragedy.
But beyond the misfortune of wasted potential, there are our children to think about. The most serious repercussion of our obsession with Hollywood is that celebrities have become our children’s heroes. And what indeed are the repercussions of damaged narcissists being the personalities that our children most worship?
The primary role of a parent is to convey to our children that love is won through goodness. Virtue brings recognition, and righteousness brings appreciation. If you’re kind to your friends and compassionate to your acquaintances, you will build meaningful relationships and will never be alone.
But along come empty Hollywood celebrities and subvert that wholesome message. Attention, rather than love, is what the child should seek. Whereas love is purchased through responsibility, attention is acquired through recklessness.
The child witnesses how behaving badly gets you into the tabloids. Even worse, the child seeks attention for attention’s sake, and so feeds his own growing narcissism. Self-absorption and materialism have our kids finding fulfillment by going to shopping malls, where they can acquire the latest styles, rather than libraries, where they can acquire ancient wisdom.
By allowing our children to worship shallow stars, we parents have abrogated our responsibility of being heroes to our kids. Mothers and fathers, rather than singers and dancers, are meant to model morality for their children. And our children are meant to learn that life is about sacrifice rather than selfishness, about offering love rather than obsessing over attention.
On one episode of my TV show, “Shalom in the Home,” I found myself sitting in the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl who was distant from her father. The walls were covered with pictures of movie stars and recording artists. There was Lindsey Lohan, who later checked into rehab, and Eminem, who has a penchant for calling women “whores.”
I asked the sweet little girl who all these people were. She started to name them. I interrupted: “Oh, I know their names. They’re famous. I was asking who they are to you. After all, they’re on your wall. No doubt they’re related to you in some way. Your uncles, aunts.”
She laughed and told me that surely I knew they weren’t related to her. I then asked, “Is there a picture of your father on your wall?” It had never occurred to her to have a picture of her own father in her room. And yet her father got up every morning at 4 a.m. order to work a 12-hour day to feed and clothe her. All this went unnoticed by his daughter, whose heroes were celebrities who didn’t know she was alive.
But the daughter was only the victim. Her father was the culprit. It was he who never believed he had earned a place on that wall. He too had bought the lie that he didn’t matter because he wasn’t rich or famous. He also worshipped at the broken altar of our Hollywood gods. He, like so many, spent the one night a week he had for a date with his wife taking her to the movies. He thought that while his own marriage to his wife wasn’t worth discussing, Brad’s relationship with Angelina was.
Children need wholesome heroes. They need to get goose bumps at hearing of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware in a desperate gambit to reverse the course of the Revolutionary War. They need to be awed by the iron resolve of Abraham Lincoln to hold together the Union and free the slaves. They need to be taken to the mountaintop with the soaring oratory of Martin Luther King. That’s why we teach our children history.
And they need to hear of how a righteous man named Abraham so loved humanity that he sparred even with God to spare the wicked inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. They need to read of a humble shepherd named Moses who brought wicked Egypt to its knees. And they need to feel the rhythm of David’s beautiful songs that he sang to God with harp and lyre. That’s why we teach our children religion.
More than anything, our children need to see daily examples of heroism in action — a mother spending a night washing dishes rather than watching TV, a father helping with homework rather than having a beer.
It’s time we parents asserted our rightful place as our children’s heroes.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach hosts “Shalom in the Home” on TLC. His latest book, by the same title, has just been released. This column originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California