For ten years I’ve answered questions sent to me via our Federation magazine. That’s about 120 questions minus ten since the July issue is when I give a summary of the those we tackled during the year. In those ten years, guess how many questions were sent my way? Go ahead, guess! Well, the answer is TWO, and one of them I answered by calling the one who asked with this reply…”No.” I don’t recall the question, but I told him it was a “yes” or “no” question and the answer was as indicated. The second question was truly a good one. All I can say is thank God I’ve been asked questions over the years; it’s those I use plus many more I make up.

When I speak to high school or college students, even younger actually, I always have the teacher/professor get questions ahead of time. I find that their questions are far more important than anything I have to convey. As a colleague wrote in 1927 (I read the CCAR yearbooks, as if I’ve got plenty of time to do that), when dealing with the young “And much more important than that which I had to say to them in my original presentation, was that that was brought out by their questions.” Hmm, and I thought I was so brilliant.

We are a questioning people. From the time the child asks “What is this?” in the book of Exodus, for all intents and purposes the beginning of the Four Questions tradition, we’ve been asking questions, and our rabbis, have answered them.

It started in the beginning. Adam and Eve hid from God in the Garden of Eden and God asked, “Where are you?” The physicist Isaac Rabi recalled that his mother would greet him at the door upon his return from school with, “Did you ask good questions?”

Rabbis love to get questions from congregants (“How long is your sermon tonight, Rabbi?” isn’t one of them), and that’s why I’ve got a treasure house of them that I’m able to use for my column.

(Speaking of questions, a young student was known for his ability to confuse the wisest of scholars. Once when he was surrounded by his fellow students, he decided to prove how clever he was. He asked the rabbi, “What was the first thing Eve did when Adam came home late one night?” The rabbi quickly replied, “She counted his ribs.”)