Getting married and why we shouldn't answer questions

The old world is rapidly aging. Please step out of the new one if you can't lend a hand for the times they are-a-changing.

Oh boy they are - I'm getting married in two weeks! As well as that being incredibly exciting the enormity of it all also means that it is quite overwhelming. There is always a challenge in facing a change in our lives that represents something unknown, regardless of how much we look forward to it. If there is one thing that we humans fear, it is the unknown. In fact, the whole of historical study grapples with the question: Why did it change? How did we get from caveman to facebook? Changes always pose the question of how we should respond to our new circumstances in, for example, jobs, relationships and health. It leads to so many questions and so many unknowns.

It is tempting and comforting to think that we can find the answers to deal with change and the future and apply them like bandages over the wounds of uncertainty - 'I'm scared mother make it go away.' And it is this issue that I think of when I consider how religious teachers in the Jewish world approach questions in general.

In popular books and Shiurim there is a glowing confidence that all your questions can be answered if you only know who to ask. What's the problem with the ultra chareidi schools, they ask? They don't let kids ask questions, so they go off the D. Let us establish a model where kids are free to ask questions which we can provide with good answers so that they'll be fine. More than that, they claim that unlike other religions such as Christianity, Judaism encourages questions. This was a frequent slogan in my teenage years and remains a fairly common go-to line in the frum community.

What wasn't added, it must be said, is the line 'until we give you the answers'. Once a teenage mind has been satisfied, it is expected to provide the intellectual backbone to last a lifetime. In many outreach organisations, there is the implicit feeling of 'we are more intelligent than the outside world' and in other religious institutions there is an attitude of, when questions become too difficult, 'Go to the Kiruv guy, he'll sort you out'. The answers themselves are seen to provide a definitive solution to life's theoretical problems.

It comes down to the issue of how we view questions in general. If we see questions as solvable problems then this widespread attitude will generally come unstuck. Because as we grow older and wiser, the problems will re-emerge, sometimes with a vengeance and the air of certainty and security that once convinced us that areas such as faith were in fact mere 'faithfulness' to the obvious comes unstuck. Time and time again, the conviction that we will always know the answers comes be viewed as part of a naive childhood mindset, and if religion is presented in this way, it will be met with the same response. It becomes relegated to the background, implicitly or explicitly, as 'grown-up' life takes priority. 

But if questions are seen as a necessary and important part of the journey of life, the fact that we have difficulty in answering them won't bother us as much. We are supposed to have difficulty in answering them. We are meant to explore, embark on a quest and keep pursuing understanding and depth throughout our lives. Answers, in fact, should not mean case closed but should just sign post us to something else. That doesn't mean that every answer should be equivocal. Certainly, there are times where a confident response is needed. But it shouldn't be presented in such a way that makes it seem like there is nothing more to say. 

Sometimes in life it seems that when challenges arise we must remember to play out one of my favourite few lines from the Lord of the rings documentary between Frodo and Gandalf:

Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. 
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. 

It is also the feeling summarised by one of Dylan's most beautiful songs, Every Grain of Sand: 
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

The future is both exciting and scary at the same time. It presents us will all sorts of questions which we will need to address and explore, but it can never be 'solved'. In Dylan's song, he embraces the world's beauty even as he goes through his own crisis of faith.

Rather than lulling the next generation into a false sense of religious security that dissipates gradually after the teenage years we should rather reassure that it is through the questions rather than the answers that we become more sensitive, confident and in fact religious human beings. Seatbelts on.