The Traitors and Fiction for the Sake of Peace

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 4 February 2024

I have spent some time this week being mesmerised, and quite a bit more time grappling with an ethical question.

This week I watched the conclusion of the hit BBC show, The Traitors. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet – don’t worry, I’m not going to give away any spoilers. But for those of you who aren’t ever going to see it, the Traitors is a two-week long game of what is also known as mafia or werewolf.

A group of 22 people is taken to a castle in the Scottish Highlands where presenter Claudia Winkleman selects 2 or 3 of them to become the Traitors, whose job it is to “murder” their fellow contestants. Then each day the whole group votes to banish someone they think is a traitor. That person stands up to reveal whether they are, in fact one of the Traitors, or whether the Faithful have banished one of their own.

We as the audience know who is faithful and who is a traitor, and we are privy to the ways in which the traitors scheme, manipulate, lie, try to throw people off the scent, frame innocent fellow contestants and sometimes even turn against their fellow traitors when they think they are not playing the game very well.

It all makes captivating the compelling television. But is it ethical? Is it ok for us to be watching something in which the contestants are encouraged to lie, manipulate, treat each other in ways that would be entirely unacceptable in real life?

One of the Ten Commandments that Rolfe just read was:

לֹֽא־תַעֲנֶ֥ה בְרֵעֲךָ֖ עֵ֥ד שָֽׁקֶר

‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.’

You shall not accuse your fellow of something you know not to be true – you shouldn’t give testimony that you know not to be true. The principle underpinning the command is simple: don’t lie; do not distort the truth.

The participants in The Traitors are not, of course, lying in a court of law, though they do often seem to vest as much emotional energy in either catching a traitor or going undiscovered. In addition, there was a lot of cash at stake in this series – nearly £100,000!

Is it just a game, or does this game carry with it the risk that the behaviours that are successful in such a game start to carry over into real life? Does a show like the Traitors encourage us as viewers to become more untruthful and more manipulative to those around us as a result. Or is it harmless fun?

The Babylonian Talmud refers to a number of times in the Bible in which lying is not only permitted but praised. Particularly, the Talmud argues that truth can be denied or twisted for the greater value of peace.

When the character of Jacob dies, his sons, fearing that their brother Joseph has been waiting for this opportunity to punish them for their behaviour towards him, tell him that before their father died he expressed the desire for Joseph to treat them well. Now, he may indeed have told them this off-screen as it were, but Jewish tradition tends to view their words as a distortion of the truth – and encourages this distortion on the basis that it promotes peace.

Indeed, one group of rabbis – the school of Rabbi Yishmael – go on to state that ‘peace is so great, that even the Holy Blessed One [even God] modifies Scripture’. The episode they cite is the one in which Sarah scoffs at being told that she will give birth to a child at the age of 90. In one verse we are told that Sarah laughs and says ‘my Lord is so old!’ – she dismisses the idea that Abraham might be able to father a child at his age. In the very next verse, God recounts Sarah’s words to Abraham, but instead of quoted her verbatim, God tells Abraham that Sarah says ‘I am so old!’ thereby making the statement about herself rather than her husband, and removing the possibility that Abraham will be offended by it.

Our tradition, in Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer, encourages us to be like the figure of Aaron, who also dissimulated and bent the truth in order to achieve peace between individuals. When two people quarrelled, he would go and speak to both parties, saying to both of them, you know, the other guy is really sorry and wants to make up with you, but is just too embarrassed to say so… Even though this was not strictly true, and did nothing to address the original cause of the hurt, the rabbis saw this as virtuous because it encouraged the parties to make peace with each other, and reduced strife in Israel. So, fiction is encouraged for the sake of peace.

It is interesting, therefore, that the rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash, the rabbis who formed the religion we live today out of the foundational literature of the Hebrew Bible, were critical of the theatres, and forbade Jews from attending them.

Perhaps this is a reason for the many stories contained in the Talmud and Midrash of the rabbis and their various dramatic interpersonal conflicts. Without the outlet of fictional drama, they created their own, and recorded it – very much like a soap opera – for us to read.

In the parallel Jewish philosophical tradition, the Jewish philosopher, Philo, was critical of the theatre in his native Alexandria, because he argued that the deception and pretence of the theatres overflowed into the courts and the council chambers of those with responsibility to rule: ‘like those who put fine theatrical masks over the most shameful faces expecting not to get caught by the audience’. The theatre, Philo says, mixes up ‘what is false with what is true, what it is impermissible to speak with what is permissible, what is private with what is public, what is profane with what is sacred, what is comic with what is serious’.

The theatres of the ancient world would often attract intense rivalries within audiences on behalf of competing performers – as we witness as well with shows like The Traitors, in which different sections of the audience might become a cheer leader for one or other contestant. These rivalries in Alexandria would sometimes lead to violence, with one performance ending with the local Roman troops being called in when people started throwing nearby objects at each other.

And yet Philo seems to have been present at the theatre much more than his philosophical and moral condemnations seem to suggest would have been appropriate. And evidence suggests that Jews were amongst the spectators of shows in Rome – to the extent that some even had reserved seats. It is clear that this involvement went very much against the grain of the moral edicts of the religious authorities.

Alexandria in the first century BCE was also the site on the writing down of the earliest extant example of a Jewish play, Exagoge, a five-act drama retelling the story of the Exodus, written by someone known as Ezekiel the Poet (not to be confused with the much earlier Ezekiel the Prophet). It has been argued that Ezekiel wrote Exagoge as a way of tempting the Jewish community away from Pagan theatres – if they were going to attend the theatre at all, better that it was a Jewish play they were seeing.

Given the reputation that reality TV has gained over the last few years, of contestants themselves being manipulated, sleep-deprived, plied with alcohol in order to behave in ways that would otherwise be unnatural, we might think that The Traitors is one of the worst culprits. As night after night, at dramatic round tables contestants are constantly being voted off – the majority of them not traitors – surely those who have been manipulated, framed, their personalities used against them, might end up embittered and scarred by the experience. Maybe time away from the cameras and producers might tell a different story, but what is remarkable about the Traitors is that, just after being voted off, contestants almost universally give a short speech in which they declare their love and affection for all those who have participated with them in this game, a often saying they have made friends for life.

We might compare this to the audience of a Shakespeare pay – say Titus Andronicus – who after over two hours of watching people treat each other in the most horrible ways, stand up and applaud. Often the actors we praise the most are those who are skilled at playing villains. We love watching people exhibit behaviours and performs acts that we would never countenance in real life. And often those who love horror films will tell you that their fellow horror-lovers are one of the gentlest and most friendly groups you will ever meet.

In his essay, ‘Why We Crave Horror Movies’, author Stephen King writes: ‘The horror movie … has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all the worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realised … I like to see the most aggressive of them … as lifting a trap door in the civilised forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in the subterranean river beneath. Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out’.

People love watching horror films and people love watching the traitors, because human nature is such that we are all compelled by this behaviour, and film, TV, books, theatre – these are all ways in which we can get our fill of them without actually doing them.

Does Stephen King’s explanation constitute a twenty-first century version of the Talmud’s assertion that the distortion of the truth can be justified if it is for the sake of peace? In other words, could it be argued that the reason it is not only permitted but encouraged that we watch shows like The Traitors, is that it gives us an outlet for our basest instincts, stopping us from indulging them in the real world? In other words mipnei darkei shalom – for the sake of the ways of peace? I think that in some ways this is how we can understand it.

Of course, there is a negative side to this argument as well – that, further than creating peace, the fictions in which we indulge on stage, on screen, on the page, are simply pacifying us, making us less active in the real world, allowing those in power to get away with real murder and real deception in the process. So, none of this is to say that we should allow entertainment to distract us from the pursuit of justice.

As always, it is about balance – and about being able to distinguish the truth which allows us to enjoy fictions and untruths in a safe way.

Our tradition reminds us over and again about concern for the real consequences for those who are involved. So, may good fiction never come at the expense of the wellbeing of those affected. And many it always be mipnei darkei shalom – for the sake of the ways of peace.

Shabbat Shalom