For reasons I cannot explain, the last few days have been filled with conversations about bad questions.  Yes, there is such a thing.  And it’s an actual problem in a world overflowing with opinions, ideas, suggestions, critiques, and so on.

Bad questions exist in every imaginable domain of human life:  in the intimacy of families, in workplaces, on debate stages, in classrooms, parliaments, city councils, school boards, on street corners, in cultural spaces, and so on.  Literally everywhere and anywhere human beings can be found, questions follow.

Years ago, I observed that my husband kept asking our autistic son “yes” or “no” questions.  I had long before realized that asking those questions generated a totally unreliable response.  Typically, our son gave an answer that was the last option offered, so if you switched the order of “yes” and “no” you changed the answer.  But he didn’t change his mind.

So I worked to get my husband instead to ask open-ended questions.  That was a big leap for a child who struggled mightily with things that are not concrete. You could show him a color, but how do you explain what ‘why’ means? I plugged away at this for years and years.  It was a process. Instead of asking, “Do you want this?” and generating a “yes” or “no,” I worked with my husband to shift the question to “Which one do you want?” hoping to elicit a sentence like “I want…”

With why questions, which I knew my son had an incredibly hard time understanding, I spent more years than I can count adding ‘because’ for him, to try to tease out the why.  As an example, “Do you want to go to the aquarium or the zoo?” “To the zoo?”  “Why?  Because…?” hoping to get more information, something like, “Because I like the elephants at the zoo.”

The art of questioning is not only relevant and urgent for people like my son, whose interior life and thinking processes remain a significant mystery for us, but in every facet of  human experience and interaction.

Just the other day, an author I’ve gotten to know asked me if I’d enjoyed his recent book.  I told him that that was the wrong question, and he laughed.  I meant it.  All he would get via his question is a straight up “yes” or “no,” but that would hardly capture my experience reading his book, and would wildly distort and undervalue my reaction to it.  ‘Yes’ or ‘no’ is a door opening or closing.  An open-ended question is a portal to so much more.

Now imagine this with nearly every other consequential thing in your life.  Let’s try it with a horrifying contemporary issue:  Jew hatred.  I don’t call it anti-Semitism, because that sounds like a weirdly soulless concept, whereas “Jew hatred” embodies the visceral ugliness that it is.

A friend and I had a discussion the other day about better or worse ways to address this cancer in our global midst.  My stance was that we fail to ask the probing questions that might force people to confront something in themselves:  their comfort in being bystanders; their indulgence of a pernicious and cruel hatred; their legitimizing of lies and stereotypes, etc. etc.

Let me offer some examples.  We have a new mayor in New York City.  He was recently asked about his wife’s liking of vile online posts declaring the FACT of gruesome sexual violence against Israeli women and girls on October 7th a hoax.  She also liked posts supportive of Hamas’s staggering brutality that day.  When asked about this, Mayor Mamdani fell back on “my wife’s a private citizen” and while many Jews were appalled, he paid no price.  And more significantly, his hateful wife was shielded from opprobrium, from any accountability.

What if, in a news conference, he gave that same answer and someone asked: “Mayor Mamdani, what would your response be vis a vis your wife if she liked a post declaring that castrating homosexuals was a long overdue good idea?  How about lynching black folks?”  I am not naive enough to believe that someone as slithery as our new mayor wouldn’t try something like “I don’t deal in hypotheticals,” but then what is incumbent on the questioner is to push past that and declare it what it is–a cowardly dodge, especially coming from someone who is quick to jump on any anti-Muslim rhetoric.

We cannot make nasty, hateful people good. But we can do a much better job of calling bullshit on their hatefulness.  In real time.

We can try to do the same with the media.  Instead of reposting every disgusting airbrushed version of background on homicidal maniacs–e.g., the two teens just in NYC for a day, never mind the nail- and bolt-studded bombs they carried, or the poor, grieving Lebanese guy who tried to commit mass murder against Jewish toddlers in Michigan, never mind his family members’ status as senior operatives in Hezbollah’s army of killers (banned by Lebanon, the nation they cannibalize with their presence).

How about we try a tact where we find a way to press these media outlets–print, TV, etc–to answer why it is that they are so determined to find a harmless or sympathetic story line for terrorists when their targets are Jews, but always lean into the ugly truths when the targets are not Jews?

Revving up our outrage meters is a fools’ mission on steroids.  It accomplishes nothing and makes us feel more vulnerable and helpless.  We need to be smarter.  It might not change things.  But doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is, as we’ve been repeatedly reminded, the definition of insanity.  The world is clearly embracing a kind of viral hatred that is targeting Jews everywhere.  Let’s not give it more oxygen on its own terms.  Let’s at least try to push back smartly, working to pry the carapace of lies and complicity off of our body politic, off of our “educators” and other “leaders” who have worked overtime to indulge something they too might come to regret.  But not before it does potentially irreparable harm to a community that has been put in the crosshairs time and time and time again.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)