Q&A: What are the reasons for the cultural phenomenon called “a Haredi on Big Brother”?
What are the reasons for the cultural phenomenon called “a Haredi on Big Brother”?
Question
I don’t know whether you happened to hear about it (and if you didn’t, all the better), but this year for the first time there’s a Haredi contestant on Big Brother: a young guy from a Hasidic family in Bnei Brak named Yanki Goldhaber. This cultural phenomenon got me thinking: how can it be that a guy from Haredi society, with its very high walls, is so exposed to secular culture that he would want to go on Big Brother? It seems to me like one of the bluntest examples of the gap between the Haredi community’s external image and what is really going on inside. What do you think?
Answer
Obviously there is a gap, and obviously this could be an example of it. But who needs examples for something that is already familiar and well known?! By the way, here what was happening inside came outside, and that erased the gap.
Discussion on Answer
By the way, is it permissible to watch Big Brother?
I have no idea. I’ve never watched it in my life. But from what I’ve heard, it seems to me to be such a level of human degradation that it’s simply shameful to watch even if it is permissible. Better to eat pork with an appetite.
Funny that דווקא in this case there’s no gap at all, because I know the family and the boy [for a period they used to pray in the same synagogue as me], and we’re talking about a good family with a father who is a Torah scholar [a real Haredi type]. What happened to the boy is a sad story: he was an average yeshiva student, then COVID came, he was at home for three months in a family of 11 people [if my memory doesn’t mislead me], and enough said.