A Night of Questions

What makes this night – tonight – different from all other nights? No matter who you are, no matter where you will be, whether it is your first or your fiftieth seder, the opening question of the Passover haggadah names the essential ingredient of this evening’s festivities: difference. Tonight should be – in every respect – different from other nights. On all other nights we eat bread and matzah, tonight only matzoh. On all other nights we eat sitting or reclining, tonight we recline. The foods we eat, the manner in which we eat – tonight we break with routine. Even the people are different. For some, tonight means sitting together with extended family – an all too infrequent activity. For others, tonight means just the opposite, welcoming unfamiliar faces to our table, or being welcomed to a new table ourselves.

Tonight should be and should feel different from the rest of our nights; that is the countercultural imperative of the seder. In our post-ethnic, hyper-individualized world, a culture in which things only exist insofar as they can be downloaded and shared from one phone to another – tonight teaches us otherwise. Tonight is different. We lean into community, into our tribal identity. We lift our heads from our hand-held devices and do the most revolutionary thing of all: engage in face-to-face dialogue. And you know what? It works! While twenty percent of American Jews may light Shabbat candles, and fifty percent may fast on Yom Kippur, over seventy percent participate in a seder, making tonight’s event the most commonly observed Jewish ritual of all.

And of all the differences, of all the inversions that make tonight unlike other nights, perhaps the most obvious is the question itself; we begin not by declaring, but by asking. Even though the script for tonight’s ritual is called a haggadah, from the Hebrew root meaning “to tell,” a quick scan of the text makes clear that it is more about the asking than the telling. Think about it. As noted, we begin with Mah Nishtanah, “the four questions,” traditionally sung by the youngest person present, presumably to engage, stir curiosity, and provoke wonder. Then come the four children – wise, wicked, simple, and one who does not know how to ask. Each child is different, and our response is not uniform because our response is just that – a response. First we listen, and then we respond, based on the question being asked and on who is asking.

I am reminded of the classic quip about how Jews converse: “We don’t listen – we wait.” Generally speaking, we do not listen to understand, we listen to respond. Not tonight, teaches the seder. Tonight we listen to the question, to the question and the subtext beneath the question – the thing beneath the thing – and then, and only then, do we respond. Dr. Siegfried Stein, the teacher of my teacher, penned a famous article tracing the origins of the seder to the Greco-Roman symposium, a structured space where, long before the days of “safe space,” guests gathered to engage, test ideas, and ask big questions without penalty. The search for the afikomen is a physical representation of a quest. The theme of questioning carries all the way through to the seder’s penultimate song: Who knows one? Who knows two? Who knows three? The entire evening, from beginning to end, is framed by questions. Freedom, vigilance, empathy, tradition, memory – the seder does not lack for take-home messages. But if there is a skill or muscle group that the seder calls on all of us to cultivate, it is the art of the interrogative: how to ask and answer questions, to inquire and to listen. The seder’s success is found not so much in the answers it provides, but in the spirit of open inquiry it engenders.

Unlike other religions, Judaism situates our faith not in assenting to fixed doctrines or dogmas, but in our ability to formulate a question and – equally if not more important – our ability to listen to a question. As Heschel taught, “We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.”

Think about the foundational narratives of our tradition. We had yet to leave the Garden of Eden when we were confronted with the Bible’s first question: “Where are you?” Given that the question was asked by God, it was clearly less about physical location and more about spiritual orientation. In the next generation, Cain, with his blood-stained hands, is asked, “Where is your brother?” To which Cain famously responds with the wrong question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” At Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham courageously confronts God with a question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” (Genesis 18:25). So too, Sarah, when she replies to the promise of a child, “Now that I am withered and my husband old, will I now have this joy?” (Genesis 18:12). From Rebecca with the twins struggling within her to Esther being challenged by Mordechai if she had not arrived at her royal station for such a time as this; from God’s hanging interrogative at the conclusion of Jonah to Job’s agonized inquiry to understand the will of God; answered or unanswered, closed or open-ended, the growth points of our people and heroes are situated in questions. “Other nations,” wrote Rabbi Isadore Epstein, “have their monuments of stone; ours are questions asked and answers given.”

By a certain telling, asking a question is how the hero of the Exodus, Moses, became Moses. He may not have been the first or second or third to pass by the burning bush that fateful day. He might have just been the one who paused to look up and ask, “madua lo yiv’ar ha-sneh? Why doesn’t the bush burn up?” (Exodus 3:3). It is only then that God calls out to him. Moses was not a good speaker, but he was a good listener. He observed, he asked questions, and then he responded – a quality that made him worthy of leadership. The ability – or inability – to ask a question is also what made Pharaoh, Pharaoh. His heart hardened; he was unable to ask if tomorrow could be different than today, unwilling to countenance the possibility that the truths of others could co-exist with his. It was a hardening, a resistance to questioning, that ultimately precipitated his downfall. Our heroes, they engage in questions. Our villains, not so much.

All of which is why I urge that tonight you dip into this essential ingredient of the seder. Pharaohs do not ask questions, they give orders. Slaves do not ask questions,  they take orders. Only free men and women engage in the give-and-take of dialogue, because doing so implies agency, curiosity, and the possibility of change. Far too often, far too many of us sit mummified in our ideological pyramids, unable to dignify alternative ideas and opposing views. We would rather be furious than curious, enrage than engage, cancel than consider. We would rather repost a view that affirms our own long-held views than ask someone how they arrived at theirs. It is not that every idea must be accepted; the second child is reprimanded for excluding himself from our people’s narrative. But all four children do have a voice and a place at the table. In our community, in our households, there are folks who hold different, radically different, views on the issues of the day from each other, from you. They sit not just at the figurative global Jewish table but at the literal one, possibly even at your seder tonight.

So, when we debate the ancient tale of our people tonight, when we debate the present dramas of our people, in Israel or here in America, do not recline into your orthodoxies. Tonight, I ask you to adopt the seder’s posture of questioning and of empathetic listening, of seeking to understand and then to be understood. I offer three steps taught to me as  the ABCs of mindful communication.

A – Acknowledge. Begin the conversation with an acknowledgement of what we share, not where we differ: concern for the well-being of the Jewish people, compassion for humanity, love of country, and love for each other. Set that as the foundation for what is to come.

B – Breathe. When you ask another, with sincerity, how they arrived at their views, do the most important and difficult thing of all: breathe, breathe again, and listen. Fight the urge to pounce, judge, and quash. Activate what scientists call the parasympathetic response, he body’s built-in system for calm and connection: breathe.

C – Choose. Remember, you have agency. You can respond in a way that shuts the conversation down or opens it up. We may assume that the fourth child does not know how to ask because they are too young, but age may have nothing to do with it. Maybe that child, proverbial or real, fears asking because they believe that if they do, then like their big sibling the second child, they will be subjected to attack. You have choice. At p’tach lo. You open up the conversation, as the Haggadah teaches. Resist the impulse to assign ill intent to another just because they believe differently. Express your views in a manner that affirms the right of another to differ. Debates are never won in the moment. I think of debates (and sermons, for that matter) as planting seeds, seeds for ideas that may – or may not – bear fruit in the future. Whether that seed will take root depends not only on the strength of the idea, but on the care with which it is planted. We do not control the harvest, but we control how we choose to sow. Choose wisely.

         Acknowledge, Breathe, and Choose: the ABCs of mindful communication. Mindful communication is difficult, but it is not rocket science. The principles have been in the seder all along. You don’t need to be a rabbi or an organizational psychologist to do it. All you need is to know that more important than you being able to declare yourself right – is the well-being of your family and the Jewish people. To repackage Fitzgerald, to hold opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to be a family. If you can do that, if those are your North Star values – then everything else will fall into place.

Today is Shabbat HaGadol, the great Shabbat prior to Passover, where we, by way of the haftarah reading, herald the arrival of Elijah the prophet into our midst. There’s an obvious question: why Elijah? Why not Moses, Miriam, Aaron, or someone else with a more direct connection to the Passover story? The answer, I believe is in the text of the haftarah. Hineh anokhi sholei’ah lakhem et eliyahu ha-navi. Behold I will send to you the prophet Elijah. V’heishiv lev avot al banim v’lev banim al avotam. He will turn the hearts of parents to children, and the hearts of children to their parents. (Malachi 3:23-24). The image is as beautiful as any offered in our tradition. The turning of hearts – parents to children and children to parents – an intergenerational dialogue by which the story and strength of our people is passed down from one generation to another. An image that, I believe, explains Elijah’s arrival at our seder table. The Elijah moment, the moment we are liberated from the narrow straits of our thinking and listen to each other, that is the moment we cross into freedom.

This Passover we are all searching for answers and we are all somehow enslaved to the stories we tell ourselves. We will find the key to our freedom in our ability to ask and to countenance big questions. When what makes tonight so very different becomes so very normal, becomes the way we live every night and every day. Hashata avdei, l’shanah haba’ah b’nei horin. This year as slaves, next year as free people. Hag Sameach!