Ezzes of Estis: Passover: Four Thousand Questions

At Passover, on Seder evening, the Jews are asked four questions. There are actually five questions because all four questions belong to a first question. And of course that’s the sixth question – why it’s called four questions when there are actually five.

The fifth question, which is actually the first but leads to the sixth, is: “What makes this night different from all other nights?” Some think the answer is that you ask so many questions, four if not five . But the correct answer is: that you only asks as many questions, so no more than four, even if there are actually five. Because on any other evening you ask many more questions, almost less than four thousand.

Ezzes von Was

Magnus Terhorst

Alexander Estis, a freelance Jew without a permanent address, writes so much schmontz in this column that it will make you sick to your stomach.

One of them is: If you ask four questions on Seder night, why do you ask many more questions every other night? The answer is: On Seder evening, the questions are asked by son Motjka. Beseder, all right. But every other evening there are questions an Son Motjka, from mother Maja and father Morduch and brother Chaim and uncle Avrum and sister Mona and aunt Sara and grandmother Riwa and great-grandmother Lija and neighbor Yankel and Rabbi Lazar and even the cat Shloymo. How are the questions asked by the cat Shlojmo? This is also another question.

But the more important question is: why do we ask so many questions? The answer is: Because there are at least as many questions as there are no answers.

It almost logically follows that there are fewer answers in the world than many more questions. Because there are questions with answers and questions without answers, just as there are holes with bejgelach (Yiddish: bagel, editor’s note) around it and holes without it bejgelach around; but there are no answers without questions, just as there are no questions bejgelach there are no holes.

This means: There is not an answer to every question, but there is at least one question to every answer, especially when you are dealing with little Motjka, because little Motjka asks, for example: Why are there holes without bejgelachbut no bejgelach without holes?

In any case: In the world there are more questions than answers, and in the Jewish world there are even more questions than in the rest of the world, although the rest of the world has more questions for the Jewish world than the Jewish for the rest. Which in turn means that the Jewish world has a question for the rest.

But why are there more questions in the Jewish world than in the rest of the world? Firstly, because there are still questions in the Jewish world, and thirdly, because we don’t know what the fourth question will be. For in the Jewish world, fifthly, all certainties are uncertain.

But above all, there are more questions in the Jewish world because some of them are answers. As we know, Jews like to answer questions. Jews like to ask back – and especially like to ask back what this cliché is about.

That’s why I actually prefer to ask forward rather than back, because if you always ask back, you can end up at the back.

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