Why Judaism Cannot Tolerate the Child Who Does Not Know How to Ask
On a radically different understanding of the fourth son
Along side Qontroversial Questions on the Parashah I’m also going to be sending out eight Haggadah ideas in the run up to Pesaḥ
(I didn’t forget to delete “This is the first!” – hurrah!)
At some point during his thirty-year tenure as Gaon (=Rosh Yeshiva) of the famed Yeshiva of Pumbedita – located somewhere near modern-day Fallujah, Iraq – Rav Sherira Gaon (906–1006 C.E.) wrote a letter to the Jewish community.1
Now, usually the moment you hear the name “Rav Sherira Gaon” with the word “letter,” you assume the topic is the celebrated Epistle of Rav Sherira Gaon, in which he recounts the history of how the Talmud came to be and the era of the Geonim that followed.
But the letter I’m talking about is a very different type of letter. As only fragments of it have survived, some of its content is unknown. But what is clear is that Rav Sherira was alerting the community to the desperate financial straits Pumbedita found itself in – and the sorry state of his yehiva writ large.
In it, he laments the decline of institutional faith in the great yeshivot first founded by the rabbis of the Talmud and urges the community to respond with their support.
As a fascinating aside, Pumbedita did experience a resurgence under the leadership of both Rav Sherira and his successor and son, Rav Hai2 Gaon. But the fact that Rav Hai is considered the last rabbi of the Geonic era adds a sad layer of interpretation to Rav Sherira’s letter here. You can’t read it without realizing that he knew the writing was on the wall; that he was begging his community to avert a looming crisis. And Pumbedita’s temporary resurgence – and the end of the Geonic era that followed as a result – means that Rav Sherira could only ensure a stay of execution for Pumbedita and the vitality of the Babylonian Jewish community as a whole.
But the reason I mention this much-less-famous letter of Rav Sherira Gaon has nothing to do with its goals and everything to do with a fascinating and curious choice of phrase he uses to characterize Pumbedita’s woes.
Because he opens by lamenting the quality of Pumbedita’s students (let’s hope none of them read the letter) and how he had to task his son, Rav Hai, with teaching them elementary – by Rav Sherira’s standards – Jewish studies. Rav Hai’s job, he tells us, was first to be “diligent in teaching them and putting the texts in their mouths.” That is, he first had to teach the students to memorize the Talmud. But second, Rav Hai had to do the following:
And anyone lo yada‘ lish’ol, “who does not know how to ask,” [Rav Hai] teaches him the method of the kushya and endears him to use this method.
What seems pretty obvious – as noted by Robert Brody, perhaps the greatest living scholar on the Geonic era3 – is Rav Sherira’s use of the term lo yada‘ lish’ol to refer to the students’ shortcomings, as it’s almost certainly an echo of how the Haggadah describes the fourth son, the she-eino yode‘a lish’ol, “the one who does not know how to ask.”
And while, at first glance, this choice of phrase seems to reinforce the stereotype of the fourth son: a child so ignorant and unaware of their Judaism that they can’t even frame a basic question about what they’re asking – there is another way to understand Rav Sherira’s framing here that completely reimagines the she-eino yode‘a lish’ol.
If we can boil down the entire Torah-learning project of the Geonic yeshivot – in contrast to all the other things that these yeshivot produced – it seems to have involved two things. The first was text preservation: it was crucial that the nascently-finalized Talmud be preserved and passed on. But the second was the most Jewish of things, argumentation.
Because it wasn’t enough for a student to have the entire gemara memorized, they needed to engage with it. To ask, not just questions in general or even clarifying questions, but specifically argumentative questions.
After all, that’s the meaning of the term I left untranslated above from Rav Sherira’s letter: kushya. It doesn’t just simply mean “a question,” it connotes objection and argumentation. That’s why Rav Sherira refers to it as a derekh, “a method.”
There is no methodology behind asking questions themselves. But when a person adopts a specific method of legal thinking – of intellectual wrangling – that involves an attentiveness to logical errors or misapplied reasoning, a better understanding of the law as a whole and how it must be applied emerges.
When Rav Sherira lamented the fact that his yeshiva had become Yeshivat She-Eino Yodea‘ Lish’ol, he wasn’t implying that he had a dimwitted student body. He wasn’t calling into question their intellects.
His issue was with their inability to oppose or argue. He needed Rav Hai to not only teach them the gemara itself but to constantly reinforce the need to spot issues to the point that he “endear[ed them] to use this method” – until it became second-nature.
And we can imagine the shock of the students, sat before the rosh yeshiva’s son – himself a great rabbi in his own right – who, amidst teaching them the sacred texts of their ancestors, was constantly injecting phrases akin to “this seems nonsense!” “This makes no sense!” “That seems an illogical step.”
To be she-eino yode‘a lish’ol was intolerable to Rav Sherira. But it had nothing to do with engagement, knowledge, or interest. Instead, it was all about inquiry and challenge.
And with this in mind, the Haggadah’s prescription for the she-eino yode‘a lish’ol can be reinterpreted. Because we usually read it as telling us, att petaḥ lo, “you must open the story for him,” with the Haggadah then citing as a proof-text “And you shall tell your child on that day, ‘Because of this the LORD acted for me when I came out of Egypt’” (Ex. 13:8).
But immediately following this, the next passage – often noted for being jarringly disconnected from the rest of Maggid – provides a little crash course in Talmudic thinking, in the art of the kushya. It asks a series of piercing questions about the wording used by the Torah, ultimately deriving minute but crucial laws and details from its inquiry.
When the she-eino yode‘a lish’ol appears at the Seder, it’s not the ignorant, disinterred child. It’s the child who doesn’t think it’s ever their place to question things. Who just assumes that everything at the Seder is where it is because that’s just what God told us.
And the Haggadah – pre-empting Rav Sherira Gaon – cannot abide that attitude. Blind fealty is not a positive Jewish character trait. And so it instructs the parent to take a moment to obsessively question the fundamental laws we think motivate the Seder: maybe we could have done the Seder two weeks ago? Maybe we could do it tomorrow morning?
This is the derekh ha-kushya, the method of inquiry, in a nutshell. It’s exactly what Rav Sherira Gaon expected his students to become second nature – and it’s exactly what the Haggadah expects of all of us.
Because if we or our children don’t spot flaws or issues with what we’re doing, then something’s gone wrong. Sure, it’s not easy knowing how to answer – but that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility of questioning and raising argumentatively curious minds.
The letter can be found in Solomon Schechter, ed. Saadyana: Geniza Fragments of Writings of R. Saadya Gaon and Others (1903) pp. 117–121.
No Jewish name is as fascinating as Hai. The best guess of scholars is that it comes from the name “Ḥayyim” (with a ḥet), which was transformed in those times into the two-syllable name “Hayyey” (with a hey). (It’s like the ḥassideshe pronunciation of “Yaakov” being transformed into “Yankiv.”) Rav Sherira himself writes it as האיי – and given he was Hai’s father, he probably knew how to spell it. But you can clearly see how it could both be read as two syllables, Hayyey (something like הַאיֵי), but also how people reading it and not knowing how to pronounce it could easily start treating it as a monosyllabic name and start calling him “Hai” (with a hey, something like הַאיי). It’s very much the Hermione of the Jewish world.
Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (2013) pp. 55–56.