Questioning and Freedom

Questions are a Paradox

The key to Jewish exegesis is to assume that nothing is obvious. Questions are the great cultural paradox. They both destabilize and secure social norms. Nikita Kruschev, onetime leader of the Soviet Union, once explained why he hated Jews. He said, "They always ask why!"

Questions tend to democratize. Ease with questions conveys a fundamental trust in the goodwill and the good sense of others. Autocrats hate questions. We train children at the Passover seder to ask why, because tyrants are undone and liberty is won with a good question. It is for this reason that God loves it when we ask why.

Consequently, we celebrate challenging the Torah to make sense, and above all to be a defensible expression of Divine goodness...When we ask good questions, the Torah is given anew on Sinai at that very moment!

Steven Greenberg, Wrestling with God and Men

Primo Levi (The Reawakening, p. 228)

And we must remember that their faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Haggadah (108)

Judaism is G-d's question mark against the random cruelties of the world. It is His call to us to 'mend the world' until it become s a place worthy of the Divine presence, to accept no illness that can be cured,no poverty that can be alleviated,no justice that can be rectified. To ask the prophetic question is not to seek an answer but to be energized to action. This is what it is to meet G-d in redemption.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

RavKook Orot Hakodesh 2:517

An epiphany enables you to sense creation not as something completed, but as constantly becoming, evolving ,ascending. This transports you from a place where there is nothing old, where everything renews itself, where heaven and Earth rejoice as at the moment of creation.

Dr. Erica Brown, Spiritual Boredom (p. 106) – Boredom occurs when we run out of questions because it demonstrates that we have run out of interest. Combating boredom in the Jewish classroom, or any classroom for that matter, is ultimately about the stimulation of questions. Returning to the Seder table, that ancient classroom of Jewish history, we find that Maimonides encouraged us to place objects, educational props, on the table and to use the complexity of the Haggadah ―to make the children ask.‖ The purpose of Passover is not to tell our children the story of Jewish peoplehood; it is to make the evening interesting enough for them to ask questions. Telling especially repeated telling, leads to a flat story with a dull landscape. Asking leads to exploration, further questioning, engagement, creativity. Boredom will only leave the classroom when we have done a good enough job of making ―the children ask.‖

Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana, Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions (2014), p. 154

The ability to ask questions may be taken for granted by highly educated people, just as asking questions as a democratic habit of mind may be taken for granted by people who have lived their entire lives in societies where they have the freedom to ask questions. but, the profound significance of being able to ask questions is not missed by people who have suffered from the absence of democracy. For example, Abraham Joshua Heschel, a rabbi and scholar who was a refugee from Nazi Germany, asserted at a White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1960 that in a democratic society we should be assessing our students less on their ability to answer our questions and more on their ability to ask their own questions.

Isidor I. Rabi, the Nobel laureate in physics who died Jan. 11, was once asked, ''Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor or lawyer or businessman, like the other immigrant kids in your neighborhood?''

His answer has served as an inspiration for me as an educator, as a credo for my son during his schooling and should be framed on the walls of all the pedagogues, power brokers and politicians who purport to run our society.

The question was posed to Dr. Rabi by his friend and mine, Arthur Sackler, himself a multitalented genius, who, sadly, also passed away recently. Dr. Rabi's answer, as reported by Dr. Sackler, was profound: ''My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: 'So? Did you learn anything today?' But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. 'Izzy,' she would say, 'did you ask a good question today?' That difference - asking good questions -made me become a scientist!''

From a letter to the editor in the NYTimes by DONALD SHEFF New York, Jan. 12, 1988

Among the most important and unique aspects of Jewish identity is that we are a people mandated to ask. Informed by the Pesach Seder, we are keenly aware that the mark of true freedom is the acceptance of responsibility and willingness to ask questions... Questioning is an essential tool to help us clarify our values; at the end of the day though, those values must endure...The most basic lesson of the Pesach Seder is that freedom carries with it the opportunity- indeed the requirement - to question. Slaves don't get to ask questions; they simply follow orders. As free individuals, not only are we permitted to question, but we are indeed mandated to do so.