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.
