Would you give a young person a book whose heroes cheat, lie, steal, murder -- and get away with it? Chances are you have. The book, of course, is Genesis. And you are right to encourage your child to read it -- with some guidance. It is the best interactive moral teaching tool ever devised: Genesis forces readers of all ages to struggle with eternal issues of right and wrong.

There is a fundamental difference between the Five Books of Moses, especially the first book, Genesis, and the New Testament and Koran. The New Testament and the Koran teach justice largely through examples of the perfection of God, Jesus, and Mohammed. Christian or Muslim parents can hand their children the New Testament or the Koran and feel confident they will learn by example how to live a just and noble life. The parables and teachings may require some explanation, but on the whole, the lessons to be derived from the lives of Jesus and Mohammed are fairly obvious. Who can quarrel with the Sermon on the Mount, or with Jesus' reply to those who would stone the adulteress on the Mount of Olives, or with the parable of the good Samaritan? The same is true with Mohammed. The Koran describes his life as exemplary and Mohammed himself as "of a great moral character." If you pattern your behavior after Jesus or Mohammed, you will be a just person.

In sharp contrast, the characters in the Jewish Bible -- even its heroes -- are all flawed human beings. They are good people who sometimes do very bad things. As Ecclesiastes says: "There is not a righteous person in the whole earth who does only good and never sins." This tradition of human imperfection begins at the beginning, in Genesis. Even the God of Genesis can be seen as an imperfect God, neither omniscient, omnipotent, nor even always good. He "repents" the creation of man, promises not to flood the world again, and even allows Abraham to lecture Him about injustice. The Jewish Bible teaches about justice largely through examples of injustice and imperfection. Genesis challenges the reader to react, to think for him-or herself, even to disagree. That is why it is an interactive teaching tool, raising profound questions and inviting dialogue with the ages and with the divine.

What lessons in justice are we to learn from the patriarch Abraham's attempted murder of both his sons? Or from God's genocide against Noah's contemporaries and Lot's townsfolk? Generations of commentators have addressed these questions, and rightfully so. They need addressing. These stories do not stand on their own. Reading the Old Testament, and especially the Book of Genesis, must be an active experience. Indeed, the critical reader is compelled to struggle with the text, as Jacob struggled with God's messenger. A midrash describes how man "toils much in the study of the Torah." Maimonides believed that Torah study is so demanding that husbands engaged in this exhausting work should be obliged to have sex with their wives only "once a week, because the study of Torah weakens their strength." For comparative purposes, rich men who don't work must have sex with their wives "every night," and ordinary laborers "twice a week." Whether or not we agree that biblical scholarship should interfere with our sex lives, it is certainly true that we are invited by the ambiguities of the text to question, to become angry, to disagree. Perhaps that is why Jews are so contentious, so argumentative, so "stiff-necked," to use a biblical term. I love reading the Torah precisely because it requires constant reinterpretation and struggle.

I first thought about justice when, as a child, I studied the Book of Genesis. To this day, I remember the questions it raised better than the answers given by my rabbis. To read Genesis, even as a ten-year-old, is to question God's idea of justice. What child could avoid wondering how Adam and Eve could fairly be punished for disobeying God's commandment not to eat from the "Tree of the Knowing of Good and Evil," if -- before eating of that tree -- they lacked all knowledge of good and evil? What inquisitive child could simply accept God's decision to destroy innocent babies, first during the flood and later in the fire and brimstone of Sodom and Gomorrah? How could Abraham be praised for his willingness to sacrifice his son? Why was Jacob rewarded for cheating his older twin out of his birthright and his father's blessing?

I first encountered these questions as an elementary-school student in an Orthodox Jewish day school (yeshiva) during the 1940s and 1950s. My teachers, mostly Holocaust survivors from the great rabbinic seminaries of Europe, encouraged the sorts of mind-twisting questions posed by the rabbis over the centuries, without fear of apostasy. These were old questions, asked by generations of believers. Each question had an accepted answer -- an answer that strengthened faith in the divine origin of the text and in the goodness of God and His prophets. Sometimes there were multiple answers, occasionally even conflicting ones, but they were all part of the canon. Some of them required a stretch -- even a leap of faith. But none, at least none that were acceptable, encouraged doubt about God's existence or goodness.

If a skeptical student asked a question outside of the canon, the teacher had a ready response: "If your question were a good one, the rabbis before you, who were so much smarter than you, would have asked it already. If they did not think of it, then it cannot be a good question." The teachers even had an authoritative source for their pedagogical one-upmanship. The Talmud recounts the story of the great teacher Rabbi Eliezer, who was teaching the following principle:

If a fledging bird is found within fifty cubits [about seventy-five feet]... [of a man's property], it belongs to the owner of the property. If it is found outside the limits of fifty cubits, it belongs to the person who finds it.

Rabbi Jeremiah asked the question: "If one foot of the fledging bird is within the limit of fifty cubits, and one foot is outside it, what is the law?"

It was for this question that Rabbi Jeremiah was thrown out of the house of study.