The Question Behind the Question

What Are We Reading For?

Every act of interpretation begins in unease. As my teachers used to ask, “What’s bothering Rashi?” Because obviously, Rashi, the medieval Jewish commentator who glosses both the Torah and the Talmud, would never write, if he were not troubled.

Language both reveals and conceals; to speak is already to miss what one means. Heidegger named this tension hermeneutics, the art of understanding as the basic form of existence.

Heidegger begins Being and Time with a question so simple it threatens to collapse under its own weight: what does it mean to be? Every genuine inquiry, he insists, has three dimensions: that which is asked about (das Gefragte), that which is questioned of (das Befragte), and that which is sought (das Erfragte). The question of Being, for instance, asks about Being itself, questions human existence as the site where Being is revealed, and seeks the meaning of that revelation.