Big Tent Judaism

Asking the Important Questions

My bubbe (grandmother in Yiddish) was one of those classic Russian Jewish immigrants, the last of her generation in our family. She was less interested in whether I learned something new at school than whether I asked good questions. And when we lived on the second floor of her home when I was a young child, that is what she would ask me each day when I came home from school. It was never: “What did you do in school today?” She was smart enough to know that the answer would probably be, “Nothing.” Instead, she would probe: “What question did you ask today? Was it a good question?” Perhaps it was that push that shaped my (sometimes overly) critical eye even as a young child.

Questions are important in Judaism. It isn’t coincidental that one of the many stereotypes about Jews is focused on how we answer questions with questions. While that may or may not be true, I don’t think that we spend enough time answering the big questions—especially in the context of our programs and institutions.

Because of the success of the project called Ask Big Questions, developed by Rabbi Josh Feigelson when he was at Northwestern University Hillel (a project that we at JOI helped shape as a result of a partnership between Hillel and JOI, funded by the Samuel Bronfman Foundation), Hillel International has taken the program national—an important step forward and a recognition of its importance. The questions posed are mostly personal—more existential, as they should be.

But there are other questions that the Jewish community has to ask, as well. Of the various questions being posed by the Jewish community today, we at JOI are thrilled at the change we see in some of these questions. In particular, even in the most inflexible institutions we have seen a real change in attitude from “Should we engage those who are intermarried?” to “How do we effectively engage the intermarried?” And even more, we at JOI have many of the answers.

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