Religious faith has often been seen as naive, blind, accepting. That is not the Jewish way. Judaism is not the suspension of critical intelligence. It contains no equivalent to the famous declaration of the Christian thinker Tertullian, “Certum est quia impossibile est – I believe it because it is impossible.” To the contrary: asking a question is itself a profound expression of faith in the intelligibility of the universe and the meaningfulness of human life. To ask is to believe that somewhere there is an answer. The fact that throughout history people have devoted their lives to extending the frontiers of knowledge is a compelling testimony to the restlessness of the human spirit and its constant desire to go further, higher, deeper. Far from faith excluding questions, questions testify to faith – that history is not random, that the universe is not impervious to our understanding, that what happens to us is not blind chance. We ask not because we doubt, but because we believe.
There are three kinds of questions, each corresponding to a different aspect of God, humanity, and the intellectual quest. The first belongs to the sphere of chachmah (wisdom), and includes scientific, historical, and sociological inquiry. Rashi interprets the phrase describing the creation of man, “in our image, according to our likeness” (Genesis 1:6), to mean “with the power to understand and discern.” Homo sapiens is the only being known to us as capable of framing the question “Why?” Maimonides includes scientific and philosophical understanding as part of the commands to love and fear God, because the more we understand of the universe, the more awe-inspiring it and its Architect reveal themselves to be. The Sages coined a blessing for seeing a sage distinguished for his or her worldly knowledge: “Blessed are You…who has given of His wisdom to human beings.” The first request we make in the daily Amidah prayer is: “Favor us with knowledge, understanding, and insight.” Human dignity is intimately related to our ability to fathom the workings of the universe, natural and social. Chachmah is an encounter with God through creation. Making man in His image, the creative God endowed mankind with creativity.
Second are the questions we ask about the Torah, like the four that open the Seder: “Why is this night different? Why do we do this, not that? What is the reason for the law?” It is one of the most striking features of biblical Hebrew that though the Torah is full of commands – 61 of them – there is no biblical word that means “obey.” Instead the Torah uses the word shema, meaning, “hear, listen, reflect on, internalize, and respond.” God wants not blind obedience, but understanding response. Moses tells the Israelites that the commands are “their wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations” (Deuteronomy 6), implying that they are amenable to human reason.
In one of the historic moments of adult education, Ezra, returning from Babylon, assembles the people in Jerusalem and reads publicly from the Torah with the assistance of Levites whose task was “to make it clear and explain the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read” (Nehemiah 8:8). The saintly Hillel, known for his gentleness to all, nonetheless said, “An ignorant person cannot be pious” (Mishnah Avot 8). The more we ask, search, and understand the Torah, the better we can internalize its values and apply them to new situations. The Torah is a meeting with God in revelation.
Undoubtedly, though, the most unique of Judaism’s questions and the one most associated with the prophetic tradition is about justice: why bad things happen to good people, why evil seems so often to triumph, why there is so much undeserved suffering in the world. Karl Marx once called religion “the opium of the people.” He believed that it reconciled them to their condition – their poverty, disease, and death, their station in life, their subjection to tyrannical rulers, the sheer bleakness of existence for most people most of the time. Faith anesthetized. It made the otherwise unbearable bearable. It taught people to accept things as they are because that is the will of God. Religion, he argued, was the most powerful means ever devised of keeping people in their places. It spread the aura of inevitability over arbitrary fate. So, argued Marx, if the world is to be changed, religion must be abandoned.
