Does the person who is being tested know what he is being tested on?

In the fifth chapter of Avot (5:4) a mishnah mentions that Abraham was tested by God with ten tests (all of which the Patriarch passed) in order to make a show of how dearly Abraham regarded Him. Much has inevitably been written on this topic. Questions such as (i) which are the ten tests, (ii) why any number from one to nine wouldn't have done just as well and (iii) which was the greatest test continue to be debated. This blogpost focuses on one small issue: the fact that the person being tested may not at the time know what the test actually is.  This little episode, drawn from the lower strata of the world of finance, illustrates the point well.

Back in the 1980s a friend of mine was a trainee bank manager with the then National Westminster Bank in London. Part of the way through the training program the trainees were given a test. They were ushered into a room full of desks, on each of which was a test paper that was several pages in length and which opened with the following rubric: “Please read this test paper carefully. Do not attempt to answer any of the questions before you have finished reading this test paper”.

 My friend obediently read through the questions without writing anything, even though he knew some of the answers without the need to consider the questions deeply. He could so easily have completed those questions as he went along. At the very end of the test paper he read the following rubric: “Do not write any of the answers to the questions on this paper”.

It transpired that the real purpose of the test was not to see what the trainee bank managers knew but to see whether they could carry out the simple instruction of not writing anything until they had finished reading the test paper. My friend was the only person who passed that test. The salutary lesson of this exercise—we may know that we are being tested but we may not recognize what we are being tested on—is even more applicable when it is God and not a bank that sets the tests.