Those hot-pink “askbigquestions” advertisements are ubiquitous on Northwestern’s campus, but most people probably don’t know that they’re a part of Fiedler Hillel, the same Jewish group that publishes Schmooze magazine and organizes trips to Israel.
The project, which started last fall, aims to “engage the Big Questions of life that all human beings wonder about, and to learn about diverse and authentic Jewish responses to those questions,” according to its Web site, though you’d have to dig to understand that there’s a religious angle at all. Online and off, askbigquestions confronts students with abstract ethical situations and matters of everyday life – the kinds of questions you could imagine a Dostoevsky character asking himself over a glass of vodka: Where do you feel at home? What are you addicted to? Would you die for a cause? For one of its talks last year, the group even invited Professor Gary Morson, an expert on Russian literature who also happens to be, yes, Jewish.
The trick is that, once you jump on askbigquestions.com, you can read answers to these questions that reference Jewish theology. But there’s no attempt to drive home that point. Unlike the unfortunately named Cru (as in, Campus Crusade for Christ), which last year solicited students’ questions about God, Hillel’s project asks the big questions first and lets the scriptural perspective follow. An essay on home begins with an advertisement at Target and a baseball metaphor, and it ends with a Genesis quote about leaving your birthplace. It’s the difference between a group that presumes your interest in religion – what were you dying to ask the big man upstairs? – and a group that provokes your natural interest in questions that have everything to do with religion.
Askbigquestions is more provocative as a marketing campaign than anything else. The blunt, snappy flyers announce the issues, and the Web site creates an open forum for student responses. But as with any public discussion on this campus, the hardest part is directing the conversation. In the site’s most recent question, “What should we sacrifice to change the world?,” two juniors talk in videos about reducing our carbon footprint, minimizing our self-interest, and giving up “a little time and effort.” They go on for too long and don’t say anything specific or personal – a soapbox speech without the good rhetoric.
The past week or so has proved NU is nothing if not conflicted about how to express itself. The MLK Day banners were filled with loaded but mostly sincere comments about race relations on campus, and ASG’s (no doubt well-intentioned) resolution condemning the prosecution of the Jena 6 came out of left field. Askbigquestions’ success – its open-endedness – is also its failure, because students are never forced to make the issues relevant to their own lives. Instead they dispense vague talking points that sound about right but mean almost nothing. When you ask big questions at NU, you’re probably going to get small answers.