JANUARY 18 • 2024 | 39

the Lord,” says a famous
Christian text. Socrates,
who spent his life teaching
people to ask questions, was
condemned by the citizens
of Athens for corrupting
the young. In Judaism. the
opposite is the case. It is a
religious duty to teach our
children to ask questions.
That is how they grow.
Judaism is the rarest of
phenomena: a faith based on
asking questions, sometimes
deep and difficult ones
that seem to shake the very
foundations of faith itself.
“Shall the Judge of all the
earth not do justice?” asked
Abraham. “Why, Lord, why
have you brought trouble on
this people?” asked Moses.
“Why does the way of the
wicked prosper? Why do all
the faithless live at ease?”
asked Jeremiah.
The book of Job is largely
constructed out of questions,
and God’s answer consists of
four chapters of yet deeper
questions: “Where were
you when I laid the earth’s
foundation? … Can you catch
Leviathan with a hook? …
Will it make an agreement
with you and let you take it
as your slave for life?”
In yeshivah, the highest
accolade is to ask a good
question: Du fregst a gutte
kashe. Rabbi Abraham
Twersky, a deeply religious
psychiatrist, tells of how
when he was young,
his teacher would relish
challenges to his arguments.
In his broken English, he
would say, “You right! You
100 prozent right! Now, I
show you where you wrong.”
Isadore Rabi, winner of a
Nobel Prize in physics, was

once asked why he became
a scientist. He replied, “My
mother made me a scientist
without ever knowing it.
Every other child would
come back from school and
be asked, ‘What did you learn
today?’ But my mother used
to ask: ‘Izzy, did you ask a
good question today?’ That
made the difference. Asking
good questions made me a
scientist.”

GOD WANTS US TO ASK
Judaism is not a religion of
blind obedience. Indeed,
astonishingly in a religion of
613 commandments, there is
no Hebrew word that means
“to obey.” When Hebrew was
revived as a living language
in the 19th century, and
there was need for a verb
meaning “to obey,” it had
to be borrowed from the
Aramaic: le–tsayet. Instead
of a word meaning “to obey,”
the Torah uses the verb
shema, untranslatable into
English because it means to
listen, to hear, to understand,
to internalize and to respond.
Written into the very
structure of Hebraic
consciousness is the idea that
our highest duty is to seek
to understand the will of
God, not just to obey blindly.
Tennyson’s verse, “Theirs
not to reason why, theirs but
to do or die,” is as far from
a Jewish mindset as it is
possible to be.
Why? Because we believe
that intelligence is God’s
greatest gift to humanity.
Rashi understands the phrase
that God made man “in His
image, after His likeness,”
to mean that God gave us
the ability “to understand

and discern.” The very
first of our requests in the
weekday Amidah is for
“knowledge, understanding
and discernment.”
One of the most
breathtakingly bold of the
rabbis’ institutions was to
coin a blessing to be said on
seeing a great non-Jewish
scholar. Not only did they
see wisdom in cultures other
than their own, they thanked
God for it. How far this is
from the narrow-mindedness
than has so often demeaned
and diminished religions,
past and present.
The historian Paul Johnson
once wrote that rabbinic
Judaism was “an ancient
and highly efficient social
machine for the production
of intellectuals.” Much of
that had, and still has, to do
with the absolute priority
Jews have always placed on
education, schools, the Beit
Midrash, religious study
as an act even higher than
prayer, learning as a life-long
engagement, and teaching as
the highest vocation of the
religious life.
But much, too, has to do
with how one studies and
how we teach our children.
The Torah indicates this
at the most powerful
and poignant juncture in
Jewish history — just as the
Israelites are about to leave
Egypt and begin their life
as a free people under the
sovereignty of God. Hand on
the memory of this moment
to your children, says Moses.
But do not do so in an
authoritarian way. Encourage
your children to ask,
question, probe, investigate,
analyze, explore.

Liberty means freedom
of the mind, not just of
the body. Those who are
confident of their faith need
fear no question. It is only
those who lack confidence,
who have secret and sup-
pressed doubts, who are
afraid.
The one essential, though,
is to know and to teach
this to our children, that
not every question has an
answer we can immediately
understand. There are
ideas we will only fully
comprehend through age
and experience, others
that take great intellectual
preparation, yet others
that may be beyond our
collective comprehension
at this stage of the human
quest. Darwin never knew
what a gene was. Even the
great Newton, founder of
modern science, understood
how little he understood,
and put it beautifully: “I do
not know what I may appear
to the world, but to myself
I seem to have been only a
boy playing on the seashore,
and diverting myself in now
and then finding a smoother
pebble or prettier shell
than ordinary, whilst the
great ocean of truth lay all
undiscovered before me.”
In teaching its children to
ask and keep asking, Judaism
honored what Maimonides
called the “active intellect”
and saw it as the gift of God.
No faith has honored human
intelligence more.

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan

Sacks served as the chief rabbi of

the United Hebrew Congregations of

the Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His

teachings have been made available

to all at rabbisacks.org.