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.