The Power of Accepting Questions

When Philip Roth published Goodbye Columbus in 1959, the American Jewish community was outraged. People were furious with Roth for “airing dirty laundry” by presenting Jews as complex, often deeply problematic, flawed human beings. Despite being raised in a household that loved literature, I was told as a teen to avoid Roth because he was a “self-hating Jew,” a common refrain in Jewish households through the second half of the 20th century. 

My perspective changed over time, though, and with much study, I came to recognize Roth’s value and felt that my students might appreciate reading “Conversion of the Jews,” a short story from Goodbye Columbus, which features the Ozzie Freedman, a boy just on the cusp of bar mitzvah, who has profound religious questions for his Hebrew school rabbi that the rabbi refuses to answer. Rabbi Binder sees Ozzie’s questions about God’s omnipotence not only as impertinent but as blasphemous, and he strikes Ozzie – the story presents this momentary violence as some combination of intentional and accidental – prompting Ozzie to run to the roof of the shul for escape. The story proceeds almost to the point of lunacy, with Ozzie flapping his arms as he runs around the roof, the whole town standing below to see what will happen next. Ozzie’s mother and the rabbi are weeping and begging Ozzie to descend, his friends encourage him to jump off the roof, and a group of weary firemen prepare to catch him if he does jump. 

The primary question to which Ozzie wants an answer is merely philosophical, but the rabbi interprets it as a religious affront: “if He [Hashem] could make all that in six days, and He could pick the six days he wanted right out of nowhere, why couldn’t He let a woman have a baby without having intercourse?” At least in my interpretation of the story, Ozzie has no interest in Christian theology, but he uses this aspect of another religion’s belief system to understand Judaism’s perspective on God. Can God really do anything? What do pronouncements of God’s omnipotence truly mean? Ozzie asks this question in the face of his own personal tragedy, having lost his father. He aims to comprehend God’s power by asking his rabbi the most outrageous thing he can imagine, wondering whether there are any limits to God’s ability to intervene in the world.

When I began teaching this story, I thought students would appreciate these relatable characters. A Jewish author, writing from the Jewish tradition, focusing only on Jewish characters and Jewish concerns, would be a welcome change in the literature classroom where most of our texts come from a Christian tradition, either implicitly or explicitly. And, indeed, the students are not only shocked that the story exists but also that it is widely read by non-Jews. They can hardly wrap their heads around the idea that it’s included in standard high school and college anthologies or that it was published in The New Yorker. How could such a thing be possible? What do students at non-Jewish schools possibly think of such a story? That itself is a useful exploration of our own positionality; our day school students constantly read works from other traditions and understand others’ perspectives, yet they fully expect that readers from the religious majority would never need to position themselves as us, the minority.

Following that conversation, though, it turns out that students do not feel much affiliation with Roth’s characters, for the best possible reason. It has been such a joy for me to learn that the vast majority of my students cannot connect with Ozzie’s experience at all. “But this makes no sense,” they say. “Rabbis LOVE when we ask questions!” According to all of my students, their rabbis and Judaics teachers are so excited by students who ask penetrating philosophical questions that the teachers will happily stay after class, meet during lunch, bring in extra texts to explore Chazal’s answers, return to those questions later in the semester, and on and on. The idea of a teacher trying to shut down a student’s probing question (let alone being so frustrated that he’d mandate a parent meeting or attempt to strike the student) feels completely ridiculous, moving “Conversion of the Jews” practically into the genre of fantasy.

But, for Philip Roth, and perhaps for many of you reading The Jewish Link today, this experience was no fantasy. Deep questions of faith had to be figured out elsewhere, but not in school, where obedience had primacy. Roth’s alienation – like Ozzie’s in the story – was so great that he moved away from his Jewishness as he matured, at various points going so far as to proclaim himself an atheist.

Something powerful has changed in Jewish education since Roth wrote this story. At SAR and many other institutions like it, we know that giving students the freedom and ability to ask questions – and to have those questions taken seriously by the adults around them – is central to our educational mission. We believe strongly that our students should feel welcome to ask questions, and we know that questioning is part of growing as Jews and learners; the fact that our students don’t recognize any aspect of the educational experience Roth describes means that Jewish education has improved significantly since Roth wrote this story. While I cannot guarantee that the pedagogy of openness keeps students within the fold any more than Rabbi Binder’s unwillingness to engage pushed Ozzie away, I believe that when you walk through SAR and hear the sounds of the beit midrash coming not only from that space but from every classroom, you would feel, as I do, that giving students the agency to ask questions is the best way to make them feel that Judaism has a place for them. 

In the middle of the 20th century, Philip Roth’s writing felt so close to the truth of American Jewry that the American Jewish community was livid he’d shared those representations with the world. Decades later, his work felt milder, more neutered; by the time he wrote The Plot Against America in 2004, the American Jewish community had accepted him as one of their own, no longer a writer to be feared or castigated. But, interestingly, for today’s generation of young Jews, his presentation of certain aspects of American Jewry – certainly of Jewish education – are now so far in the past that my students find them utterly unrecognizable. In my mind, this is a massive success of our work as educators. My students respond to this story incredulously, asking, “how could a teacher be like this? Teachers are supportive; their whole job is to answer students’ difficult questions.” I wish that Philip Roth himself could have benefited from the education that he dreamed of for Ozzie. Such a thing felt impossible to him at the time, but now it is a reality.