In Judaism, questioning is not just allowed, it is encouraged. It is through questioning that we deepen our understanding, strengthen our faith, and continue the tradition of passing on knowledge from one generation to the next. So, as we celebrate the Exodus and the freedom it brought, let us remember the importance of asking questions, seeking answers, and never taking our freedom or our faith for granted.
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Parshat Bo is a reminder that education is the key to preserving our civilization, and that starts with encouraging our children to ask questions and seek knowledge. Let us continue to pass on the stories of our past, the lessons we have learned, and the values that guide us, so that future generations may continue to grow and thrive in their faith.
Why? Because we believe that intelligence is G-d’s greatest gift to humanity. Rashi understands the phrase that G-d made man “in His image, after His likeness,” to mean that G-d 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 G-d 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 G-d. 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 suppressed 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 G-d. No faith has honored human intelligence more.