A Civilization of Questions

I recently had occasion to revisit one of the most original and enjoyable books about Judaism published in this century. Titled Jews and Words, it was penned by the Israeli novelist Amos Oz alongside his daughter, the historian Fania Oz-Salzberger. Sadly, the central thesis of the book—that Jews are not so much a nation or religion as a giant, three-millennia-old book club—is inadmissible on grounds both historical and religious.

Nonetheless, it remains a delightful intellectual romp over the length and breadth of Jewish letters, offering observations that range from the genuinely brilliant to the borderline illiterate, alternately enlightening and maddening. Just the ticket, in other words, for enlivening a lengthy Shabbat afternoon, especially during that magical hour when our toddler condescends to pretend-nap in his room while his parents take a much-needed breather.

One observation from this book impressed itself upon me most forcefully on a second reading, namely, that the Hebrew Bible is absolutely obsessed with asking questions. From the very first divine-human dialogue ("Where are you?" God asks the cowering Adam) all the way through the biblical narratives, prophecies, wisdom literature, and poetic works, the question mark predominates. Whether it is Moses desperately bargaining with God for his nation’s survival ("What will Egypt say?"), Ecclesiastes musing darkly on the ultimate fate of human striving ("What does man gain by all his toil under the sun?"), or—a personal favorite—King Achish of Gath hurling a seemingly-deranged David out of his court ("Am I lacking in lunatics?"), the Bible is suffused, end to end, with interrogation.

Why?

One explanatory path was forged long ago by the famed literary critic Erich Auerbach (1892-1957). In his celebrated essay "Odysseus' Scar," he points out that biblical narratives are composed in such a manner—laconic, suspenseful, riddled with deliberate ambiguities—that invites, even demands, active audience participation. Unlike most other central texts of the ancient or modern world, the Bible never furnishes the entire story. Interior lives stay opaque; motivations go unexplained; pauses remain pregnant; vast stretches of time are bridged by a single verse.

The enormous genre of Midrash, or creative exegesis, arose as a response to precisely this literary invitation. The reader of the Hebrew Bible does not merely imbibe and marvel at the narrative (as one might a Homeric or Virgilian epic), but is rather called upon to intervene—to probe, to supplement, to supply light and color and action to the otherwise recalcitrant text. This mode of invitational prose goes hand-in-glove with the posing of ceaseless questions, conscripting the reader as an active participant in the drama. As the would-be respondents, we are enjoined to advocate alongside Moses, to commiserate with Ecclesiastes, and to laugh at the exasperated Achish.

This culture of incessant questioning is very much on my mind this week, for on the very day that this missive descends gracefully into your inbox, I and millions of Jews worldwide will be sitting down to one of the most elaborate and ancient rituals in all of religious practice: Seder night, the first evening of Passover. When performed with full pomp and circumstance, the Seder is an event that must truly be witnessed to be believed. Picture the scene: an enormous family gathering, with grandparents and grandchildren, siblings and cousins, honored guests and bemused strangers, all participating boisterously in a sprawling, drawn-out evening comprising rousing songs, bizarre customs, prodigious quantities of wine and matzah, an abundance of laughter and chaos, and above all, discussion: Ceaseless, clamorous, vibrant discussion, centered upon the text of the Haggadah, which weaves together biblical verses, rabbinic traditions, and fervent prayers in an effort to do justice to the world’s first and greatest story of liberation.

Fine, sensible readers of this newsletter may find it difficult to credit that a gathering of otherwise sane individuals might sit around for four or five consecutive hours, arguing relentlessly over the correct interpretation of an arcane verse, before consuming a sandwich of crackers and horseradish.

Yet in my home growing up, this was par for the course. Raised in an overwhelmingly rabbinic family, in which textual disputation was regarded not so much as a pastime but rather a competitive sport, our Seder rituals routinely lasted until three o'clock in the morning. At last, having finally exhausted our symposium, we would shoo out our guests, survey the wreckage, and retire hazily and boozily to our beds. It remains, despite its chaotic complexities, a favorite night of the year not only for me but, I suspect, for a great many other Jews besides.

Many of the curious rituals of this evening stretch back at least two millennia. For all their antiquity, however, they occasion no small amount of befuddlement, and remain the subject of considerable scholarly and communal discussion. Yet by far the most common response given to inquiries such as "why do we recite this?" or "what is the purpose of eating that?" is a slightly maddening one: so that the children will ask questions.

Put otherwise, eliciting questions from children and fueling their curiosity is regarded as an end in itself, toward which the adults are expected to expend effort, ingenuity, and quite often, their dignity. Dipping vegetables into salt water, hiding pieces of matzah around the house, decanting a goblet of wine for a prophet who departed some twenty-eight centuries ago—all of these peculiar observances exist, at least in part, to provoke the children at the table into asking why.

I confess that as a youngster I found this answer irritatingly circular. Why should so much of the evening be devoted to artificially engineering questions from small children? Might we not simply recount the substance of the occasion—the miraculous, providential process of our liberation from Egyptian bondage—and retire, in a dignified manner, before the first light of rosy-fingered dawn?

With the hard-won hindsight of encroaching middle age (the fourth decade, I can report, is quite the condition), and with my newfound vocation as a classroom teacher, the wisdom of the classical approach has become increasingly apparent.

The anonymous architects of the Seder understood something that our own civilization is in danger of forgetting: that finding the right question is not merely a means to an answer, but a profound intellectual and moral exercise in its own right. To ask a question is to acknowledge the limits of one's understanding, to orient oneself toward a truth not yet possessed, to enter into genuine dialogue with a text, a tradition, or another human being. An education that merely transmits answers produces, at best, passive repositories of information. An education that cultivates dauntless inquiry produces minds truly capable of wonder. It is in this state of wonder that all serious thought begins.

We live in an age swamped with relentless, wheedling demands upon our attention, in which algorithmically curated answers impose themselves before we have been granted the mental space to formulate the questions. In such a climate, the rediscovery of raw curiosity, along with the willingness to sit and savor the perplexity, may prove to be one of our most vital educational and spiritual endeavors. The Seder, that magnificently unwieldy engine of inquiry, has been instilling this lesson for millennia.

Thus, in the inquisitive spirit of the evening, I shall leave you not with an answer but with a question—the same question, in fact, with which the youngest child traditionally inaugurates the Seder: Mah nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot? Why is this night different from all other nights? The Haggadah, characteristically, declines to provide ready answers. Perhaps that is the secret of its endurance?

— J.J. Kimche