Don't rush to answer!

One of the seven tests of someone who is wise, in contrast with the person who simply does not know how to behave, is that of how they answer a question (Avot 5:9). The wise approach is not to answer in haste, but to pause for thought before responding.

It is not difficult to think why this might be so. A hasty answer stands a better chance of being wrong, or at least incomplete. In addition, a person who spills out an answer without stopping to think might be creating the false impression that he or she has truly mastered the subject, while the speed is actually the product of a dearth of understanding rather than a superfluity of it. Explanations of this mishnah are generally along these lines, and many commentators regard the matter as so obvious that they offer no discussion of this proposition at all.

An exception is the Tiferet Tzion of Rabbi Yitzchak Ze’ev Yadler, which considers the swift and snappy answer from the perspective of the questioner: if you ask a question and the answer comes hurtling straight back at you without a moment’s thought, might you not feel embarrassed that the answer was obvious and/or that your question was stupid or insubstantial? The need to protect the feelings of students who have to ask questions is already noted earlier in Avot (at 2:6) by Hillel, who tells us that an irritable, impatient person cannot teach.

My many years teaching undergraduate, postgraduate and professionally qualified students taught me a lot about answering questions. Below are a few personal observations. Readers may wish to add their own.

Being asked a question to which one instantly knows the answer, especially if the questioner is a good student, is immensely pleasurable. The temptation to “grandstand” and give a magnificent impromptu answer can be hard to resist, as I found for myself, particularly in my earliest years as a law teacher, when I was less confident of my own skills and sometimes needed a boost. Being able to dash off a virtuoso answer off the top of my head provided this buzz, though some of these answers did require “qualification” or “further explanation” in order to give them cogency.

A swift response can be an over-response. When I have been asked variations of the same question by students over a period of years, I have sometimes had an answer that was “ready to roll” but which, becoming gradually wider and fuller in its substance, required thought from me if it was not also to answer points that the student in front of me was not actually asking.

An answer must fit the requirements of the questioner. In my own student days, my questions were sometimes answered by a format such as “I can tell you the right answer, but I can’t tell you precisely why”, usually followed by the suggestion that I go to the library and read up the reasons for myself. I used to find this really annoying. A student cannot quote an unreferenced and unsupported opinion of his professor in an examination and expect to get away with it. If the teacher concerned couldn’t tell me the reason, I didn’t care what his answer was and whether it was right or not.

The question that is asked may not be the question for which the questioner wants the answer. It is not uncommon for students of any subject to be quite inexpert in phrasing their questions. An attentive teacher, listening carefully to the question, may be able to discern this and check with the questioner before setting out to answer it.