The Four Questions

Isidor I Rabi, the Nobel laureate in physics, was once asked, "Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor or lawyer or businessman, like the other immigrant kids in

your neighborhood?"

"My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: 'Nu Did you learn anything today?' But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. 'Izzy,' she would say, 'Did you ask a good question today?' That difference--asking good questions--made me become a scientist."

The key to Jewish exegesis is to assume that nothing is obvious. Questions are the great cultural paradox. They both destabilize and secure social norms. Nikita Kruschev, onetime leader of the Soviet Union, once explained why he hated Jews. He said, "They always ask why!"

Questions tend to democratize. Ease with questions conveys a fundamental trust in the goodwill and the good sense of others. Autocrats hate questions. We train children at the Passover seder to ask why, because tyrants are undone and liberty is won with a good question. It is for this reason that God loves it when we ask why.

Consequently, we celebrate challenging the Torah to make sense, and above all to be a defensible expression of Divine goodness...When we ask good questions, the Torah is given anew on Sinai at that very moment! Steven Greenberg, Wrestling with God and Men

A novel does not assert anything: a novel searches and poses questions. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything...

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world build on sacrosanct certainties, the novel is dead. The totalitarian world is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties. Milan Kundera

Questions should be easy, the problems known, the interrogations plain and familiar, not intricate and dark, so that they may neither vex the unlearned nor frighten them from the disquisition

At the beginning of seder night, Jerusalem's Professor Reuven Feuerstein, world renowned special needs educator, always warns the children around the table: "Tonight is seder night. This is an important occasion and we have much to read, so we cannot be bothered with all sorts of questions. If you ask any questions, I will be forced to punish you: I will throw lots and lots of candies at you. Understood?"

Unsurprisingly, the children spend the rest of the night asking many questions, stopping only to collect the candies thrown at them by the old professor...

After asking how this night is different from all other nights, you might want to take this opportunity to go around the table and have people share: How am I different tonight and this year from previous years? What has changed this year?

Seder night reflections: "What is the difference?" we asked,

"What makes this night different from all other nights?"

And most of us grew up and don't ask any more, while others

Continue to ask their whole lives just like they ask

"How are you?" or "What time is it?" while continuing to walk on

Without hearing the answer. "What's the difference?" Every night

Like an alarm clock whose tick-tock calms and tranquilizes.

"What's the difference?" Everything changes. Change is God

Seder night thoughts: "The Torah speaks of four sons

One who is wise, one who is wicked, one who is simple, and one

Who does not know how to ask. But it does not speak

About one who is good, nor about one who loves.

And this is a question that has no answer and if it did have an answer

I wouldn't want to know it. I, who have passed through all the sons

In various combinations have lived my life, the moon has shone

Upon me without apparent cause and the sun has run its course and Passovers

Have passed without an answer. "What's the difference? What has changed?"

Change is God, and Death is his prophet.