RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS
Parshat Bo turns three times to the idea of children and the role of parents in educating them. As Jews we believe that to defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilisation you need education. Freedom is lost when it is taken for granted. Unless parents hand on their memories and ideals to the next generation – the story of how they won their freedom and the battles they had to fight along the way – the long journey falters and we lose our way.
What is fascinating is the way the Torah emphasises the fact that children must ask questions. The four passages where this emphasis is placed have become famous because of their appearance as the Four Children in the Haggadah on Pesach.
Reading them together, the Sages concluded that children should ask questions, Seder night should revolve around a child’s questions, and it is the duty of a parent to encourage their children to ask questions. There is nothing natural about this at all. To the contrary, most traditional cultures see it as the task of a parent or teacher to instruct, guide, or command, and the task of a child to obey. “Children should be seen, not heard,” goes the old English proverb. Socrates, who spent his life teaching people to ask questions, was condemned by the citizens of Athens for corrupting the young. In Judaism the opposite is the case. It is a religious duty to teach our children to ask questions. That is how they grow.
Judaism is unique, for it is a faith based on asking questions, sometimes deep and difficult ones that seem to shake the very foundations of faith itself. For example, in yeshiva the aim is to learn to ask a good question. Our highest duty is to seek to understand the will of God, not just to obey blindly. We believe that intelligence is God’s greatest gift to humanity. The very first of our requests in the weekday Amidah is for “knowledge, understanding, and discernment.” One of the most breathtakingly bold blessings created by the rabbis is the bracha to be said upon seeing a great non-Jewish scholar. Not only do we see wisdom in cultures other than our own, we even thank God for it. That’s a clear sign of how much Judaism values intelligence, scholars, and learning.
Ultimately it’s all about how we learn and how we teach children. The Torah focuses on this at the most powerful and poignant point in Jewish history – just as Bnai Yisrael are about to leave Egypt and begin their life as a free people. Hand on the memory of this moment to your children, the Torah says, encouraging them to ask, investigate, analyse, explore. Liberty means freedom of the mind, as well as the body.
It’s essential to know, and to teach our children, that not all questions have an answer we can immediately understand. There are some ideas that we will only fully comprehend through age and experience. Others may be entirely beyond our collective comprehension at this stage of the human quest.
Isaac Newton, founder of modern science, understood how little he understood, and put it beautifully: “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.” The more we know, the more we realise is still left to be learnt, if we keep investigating.
In teaching its children to ask and keep asking, Judaism honoured what Rambam called the “active intellect” and saw it as the gift of God. No faith has honoured human intelligence more.
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