FROM THE TEAM
FROM THE EDITOR
WWW.JEWISHLIFE.CO.ZA
I
’ve been watching the BBC series, Tribes, which features explorer Bruce
Parry’s encounters with indigenous people in some of the most
remote places on Earth. His first step is usually to befriend the chief and
negotiate permission to live with the tribe for about a month, learning
about their way of life. Parry himself makes no judgments about the
tribe’s practices and tries to embrace each culture fully, right down to
extreme body modification and hallucinogenic drug-taking.
If we look at humanity in its most primitive, natural form, there are a
whole lot of sharp-pointed sticks, and whoever has the most dangerous
weapons and knows how to use them, gets whatever they want.
What struck me about the series was how unnatural the Ten Commandments actually are!
Fundamental concepts that characterise Jewish life, like justice, equality before the law, the
sanctity and purpose of all human life, are simply non-existent. Did you know there are some
tribes in the jungles of Brazil that have no idea the rest of the world exists? They are just too deep
in the impenetrable Amazon to be accessed, and there are laws against even trying. The laws are
designed to protect the uniqueness of these tribes, and protect them from cultural imperialism
and missionaries, kind of like protecting natural resources by creating national parks.
But parks and people are rather different. An ecological habitat in its purest form is a thing of
beauty, even if nature can be cruel (picture a pride of lions hunting a baby antelope), whereas it
is a fact that there are tribes that still practice cannibalism! And infanticide! And members with
physical or mental disabilities are actually murdered, persecuted or abandoned to the elements.
Girls from neighbouring tribes are routinely captured, kidnapped and forced to ‘marry’ and
integrate into the new tribe, which becomes their prison. But we must not judge them. We must
not impose our values on their sacred traditions. Morality is relative.
Or is it? The festival of Shavuot, commemorating the giving of the Torah, says not. That G-d
Almighty has a vision for how human beings should and should not behave, and He went to
the trouble of communicating that code to man, en masse, as the Tribes of Israel gathered at
the foot of Mount Sinai. The Torah is in fact choc-full of absolutes, which are very
unfashionable these days.
Personally, I believe that beneath our civilised veneer, we have not evolved much and those
Ten Commandments are talking to each of us, telling us to transcend our animalistic physical
natures and access our souls, which are capable of much more than hunting, gathering and
fighting over scarce resources. This blue planet would look like a very different place if humanity
took those commandments to heart, and it’s up to us as the Jewish people to continue to bear
witness to that watershed event all those generations ago. Chag Shavuot Sameach.
FEATURING…
ED’S PHOTOGRAPH: ILAN OSSENDRYVER
SARAH SASSOON
AT JEWISH LIFE, I… explore and write about Jewish and