Questioning Our Way to Freedom

As a kid, I asked a lot of questions. I would follow my mother around saying: “What’s that? How does this work? Why do we do this? When did you do that?” I’ve been told that I had an adorable blend of inquisitiveness and pestering.

It will come as no surprise, then, that Passover is my favorite holiday. The Four Questions are an iconic moment in the seder. I am an oldest child and the eldest of my cousins, so it was never my job to ask, but I would still spend the night peppering my family seder with other requests for explanations and information.

Likewise, when the rabbis of the Talmud lay out their expectations for the seder, they imagine that the whole night will be spurred by questions. With the Four Questions, the rest of the rituals cannot continue. And, in true rabbinic fashion, the rabbis have plenty of their own questions about what questions to ask, when they should be asked, the motivation for asking, and who asks the questions.

Let’s take a look at who they say should ask. In the Talmud (Pesakhim 116b), the rabbis teach that the first person who should ask is a child. If there are no children, then the seder leader’s wife asks (yes…we are working from a gendered text with a patriarchal bias). If he is alone, he should ask himself. And, if there are only two scholars at the seder and they both know all of the laws and teachings about Passover, even they should ask questions, one to the other.

Here, finding an answer is not the goal. The questions are not necessarily asked because the asker is uninformed. Even the most knowledgeable rabbis have to ask each other! The act of asking questions takes center stage here.

What is so special about asking questions? My teacher, Professor Michael Chernick, says that the rabbis of the Talmud are trying to tell us that the act of asking questions is the opening stage of human freedom. Passover, our holiday of freedom and redemption, is the perfect time to live out that principle.

If you are in a place where asking questions leads to being attacked or shut down, you know where you stand and you learn what that society is like. If you are not free to ask questions, you are completely subject to someone else’s will. In some sense, you are a slave. Getting to ask questions is an important way to show that we are free.

But wait, there’s more! Looking back at our text; what’s the deal with the list of people? Why start with the kid, then the wife, then lonesome seder-goer asking himself? This list starts with the person who is lowest in the hierarchy of the household. The person who is first called on to ask a question, to carry out the essential freedom action, is the one who is least likely to speak out. The rabbis insist, specifically those who might be reticent to speak out in public are invited to be free enough to ask questions at seder.

How will you exercise your freedom to ask this Passover? And, how might you empower others to share in the redemptive potential of asking questions?

This originally appeared as the JudaiConnection article on the back page of the Woodland's Community Temple bulletin: Makom.