There is a well-known story about Rav Chaim Brisker, one of those stories whose simplicity hides a lifetime of truth. A former Volozhiner talmid who had long fallen off the derech once met Rav Chaim after many years. Feeling uncomfortable, maybe even guilty, he blurted out, “Rebbe… what can I say? Ich hub kashas — I have questions.” Rav Chaim looked at him with the crystal clear Brisker clarity that cuts through all the phoniness. “Du hust nit kashas. Du hust teirutzim. You don’t have questions,” he said. “You have answers.”
There are questions which people really yearn to understand and know the answers to, and then there are answers disguised as questions, a protective coating shielding their lame excuses, and opinions. There is not a morsel of true concern or desire to know embedded in those questions. They are simply excuses for the actions or opinions.
That distinction between kushyos and teirutzim has been on my mind a great deal lately. Because in our world today, questions have become a powerful rhetorical device. Entire media careers are built on the pose of the innocent inquisitor, “I’m just asking.” Questions are presented as curiosity, but they function as cudgels. They allow a person to espouse a position without the burden of admitting it. And they allow a person to undermine truth while claiming to merely “probe” it.
Perhaps no one has refined this act more than Tucker Carlson, the prominent commentator who, of late, has been revealing his bias against Israel and Jews, by “just asking questions.” When the sympathy of the world was briefly on the side of Israel, he publicly wondered why Americans were responding so emotionally to the horrors of October 7. He described it as “odd” that people seemed so invested in “a foreign tragedy.” He even insisted that while he was “horrified,” he found the depth of reaction disproportionate. Why, he “asked,” do domestic American tragedies not stir the same passion?”
He seemed to have overlooked the fact that over thirty Americans were murdered on October 7, and nine Americans, including a three-year-old child, were taken hostage. They came from across America: Florida, New Jersey, California, and Long Island. But the fact that this happened in Israel suddenly made him ponder the relevance of the tragedy.
He had other questions: Why are the American victims of terror in Gaza and in Israel being compensated with American tax dollars?
He never stopped to ask why Americans who are attacked in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, or on the streets of New York City are entitled to compensation, which, by the way, does not come from taxpayers, but from assets seized from terror organizations.
His hostility toward Israel, and often toward Klal Yisroel itself, is packaged not in open declarations, but in a veneer of innocent inquiry. Tucker Carlson has perfected the art of not stating his bias outright; instead, he cloaks it in the disarming phrase, “I’m just asking questions.” But anyone with seichel understands that these are not genuine questions searching for truth. They are carefully engineered rhetorical devices, designed to plant suspicion and legitimize ugly assumptions without taking responsibility for saying them. It’s the classic move of plausible deniability. He will imply his conclusion while pretending not to have actually crafted it, and with the ability to deny endorsing it.
So he will “ask,” with dramatically raised eyebrows, “Why should American taxpayers fund Israel’s war?” He will wonder aloud, “Is Israel controlling American policy?” He will invite a guest who traffics in Holocaust minimization or echoes stereotypes about Jewish power, and then shrug with false innocence, “I’m just trying to hear all sides.” But the “side” being featured is never the one defending Yidden or contextualizing the atrocities committed against us; it is always the voice that seeks to delegitimize, to cast doubt, to frame Israel as the villain and those who wish to destroy us as the misunderstood victims. The message is clear. The question is only the delivery system. And anyone who has spent a day in yeshiva realizes that there are honest questions that pursue truth, and there are questions that are nothing but weapons, crafted to undermine rather than illuminate.
A person asking real questions would start with an honest evaluation. But a person asking teirutzim never will.
That same selective questioning pattern appears again and again. He will have a softball interview with Vladimir Putin. He will cuddle up in conversation with Qatar, the chief funder of Hamas. He will platform a Holocaust denier, allowing asinine questions to resonate with millions of Americans who do not know better. When challenged for giving such venom a megaphone, he will say. “I’m just asking!”
Again: kushyos? No. These are teirutzim.
And once you begin to recognize the genre, you see that this pattern is not limited to the secular world or political punditry. Unfortunately, a milder, more “heimish” version creeps into our own camp as well, especially when the subject turns to sensitive issues and pressure on the yeshiva world.
Nobody, chas v’shalom, wants to come across as belittling Gedolim or challenging the guidance of the Torah leadership of our generation. So they don’t say anything openly. Instead, they “just ask questions.” They are polished, respectful, almost innocent questions. But the bottom line is that, through the tone, the framing, and the emphasis, one gets the sense that the questions are not seeking truth but chiding and poking holes in difficult issues.
“I’m not disagreeing with the Gedolim at all, chalilah, I’m just wondering whether maybe the Torah world is overreacting a bit?” “Is the matzav really so dire? I’m just asking…”
No, they are not “just asking.”
A true kushya begins with sincerity: I want to understand. While a teirutz in disguise begins with skepticism.
And when it comes to the value of limud haTorah, to the protection Torah provides, the sensitivity toward outside influences, and the role of lomdei Torah in the survival of Klal Yisroel, the Gedolim have spoken with a clarity that does not leave any crack or crevice for reinterpretation. When people “ask questions” that subtly chip away at that, we sense immediately that the question was not born from a search for emes, but from the desire to feel comfortable with a worldview that is more in line with Western values.
The questions that function as a teirutz.
And sadly, in the wrong hands, questions become as dangerous as statements, sometimes more so, because they wear the disguise of modesty and open-mindedness while delivering a message of quiet rebellion. We have to know how to distinguish when a question is really a teirutz.
And in today’s climate — when antisemitism is surging, when Jewish students are harassed on campuses, when mobs chant for the destruction of Israel in major American cities, the weaponization of “questions” becomes even more potent. The normalization of anti-Jewish narratives, the softening of hard edges, and the legitimizing of voices that hate us, are all too often camouflaged in the velvet language of inquiry.
When a man with millions of listeners chooses consistently to amplify voices hostile to the Jewish people, while framing the Jewish state as the aggressor, and chooses not to “ask” about American victims of terror, not to “ask” about hostages, not to “ask” about Hamas brutality then, with apologies to his rhetorical flourishes, these are not questions.
They are conclusions.
They are teirutzim dressed in the costume of kushyos.
I guess I will not change the name of this column, from “Just Saying…,” to “Just Asking…”
Because asking is sometimes really answering, and for me, I will keep it as,
Just Saying.
