Nothing could be less true of Judaism – the faith born when God liberated a people from the chains of slavery. The question that echoes through the history of Judaism – from Abraham to Jeremiah to Job to rabbinic midrash to medieval lament to chassidic prayer – is not acceptance of, but a protest against, injustice. There are some questions to which the response is an answer. But there are other questions to which the response is an act. To ask, “Why do the righteous suffer?” is not to seek an explanation that will reconcile us to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It is to turn to God with a request for action, and to discover, in the very process of making the request, that God is asking the same of us.
There are three scenes in Moses’s early life. He sees an Egyptian attacking an Israelite, and he intervenes. He sees two Israelites fighting, and he intervenes. He sees non-Israelite shepherds mistreating the non-Israelite daughters of Yitro, and he intervenes. To be a Jew is to be prepared to act in the face of wrongdoing. When Rabbi Chaim of Brisk was asked, “What is the role of a rabbi?” he replied, “To redress the grievances of those who are abandoned and alone, to protect the dignity of the poor, and to save the oppressed from the hands of their oppressor.” Judaism is God’s question mark against the random cruelties of the world. It is His call to us to “mend the world” until it becomes a place worthy of the Divine Presence, to accept no illness that can be cured, no poverty that can be alleviated, no injustice that can be rectified. To ask the prophetic question is not to seek an answer but to be energized to action. That is what it is to meet God in redemption.
The three types of question are therefore interrelated. When we use our understanding of creation in conjunction with the commands of revelation, we help to bring redemption – an act at a time, a day at a time – knowing that it is not given to us to complete the task, nor may we stand aside from it.
There are three conditions, though, for asking a Jewish question. The first is that we seek genuinely to learn – not to doubt, ridicule, dismiss, reject. That is what the wicked son of the Haggadah does: he asks not out of a desire to understand but as a prelude to walking away.
Second is that we accept limits to our understanding. Not everything is intelligible at any given moment. There were scientists at the beginning of the twentieth century who believed that virtually every major discovery had already been made – not suspecting that the next hundred years would give rise to Einstein’s relativity theory, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Godel’s theorem, proof of the big bang origin of the universe, the discovery of DNA, and the decoding of the human genome. In relation to Torah, many German and American Jews in the nineteenth century could not understand Jewish prayers for a return to Zion, and deleted them from the prayer book. These facts should induce in us a certain humility. Not every scientific orthodoxy survives the test of time. Not everything in Judaism that we do not understand is unintelligible. The very features of Jewish life one generation finds difficult, the next generation may find the most meaningful of all. Faith is not opposed to questions, but it is opposed to the shallow certainty that what we understand is all there is.
