Four Questions Files: Details From the Youngest Who Have Had to Ask Them

Andrew Guckes | Staff Writer

Each year at Seder tables across the world, youngest siblings prepare for their moment. Tradition dictates that the holiday’s essential four questions, which initiate the discussion of Passover’s meaning, are asked by the youngest participant who is able.

For Lafayette Hill resident Rich Eden, the duty landed on him as a child at the seders held by his father’s family. What’s unique, though, is that Eden never stopped saying it.

“Before I moved out of New York and there were no grandnieces or -nephews, I was saying it because I’m the youngest of the family,” Eden said. “If there’s no [young family members] attending, I ask them. … Even in my older age, I’m still the baby of the family.”
For some families, the tradition of the four questions is a chance for a funny family member to draw laughs. For others, it’s used as an opportunity for a young Jew to attempt to participate in a ritual for the first time. Those who asked the questions remember them vividly.

“I’m gonna guess I was five or six years old when I picked them up,” said Alan Kaplan, a Villages of Shady Brooke resident who recalled the seders of his youth well. “My brother was born five years after me, so by the time he was around that elementary age, I would have stepped off.”

Eden said that he is still not sure how the duty got passed to him because he has a paternal cousin who is younger by less than a year. Somehow, the cousin avoided the responsibility of asking the four questions.

“I was not gregarious at my young age; I was a little bit quiet. So they all looked at me to read the four questions, and I was always a bit nervous and intimidated with that crowd that really knew their [stuff],” Eden said.

Eden’s memories of these early days are enriched by the fact that his dad recorded all of it. In the 1960s, Eden’s father was a film fanatic, and he used his 8-millimeter handheld recorder complete with a blinding bulb on top to capture moments from Passover. While the moment he found out he’d be asking the questions isn’t on film, plenty of others are.

Kaplan said that he thinks that the four questions are a key component of the Passover seder because it helps make everyone a part of the observance.

“You want to involve everybody, even the person who might be the least observant and maybe the least knowledgeable about the religion. If you don’t expose everybody to it, those children might feel like they were left out,” he said.

Kaplan is a member of Beiteinu and Chabad of Newtown. Something the rabbi told him at one point applies to the idea of including even the youngest or least knowledgeable person in the seder.

“He compares religion to something like climbing a ladder,” Kaplan said. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re on the top rung or the bottom rung, you just don’t want to be going down the ladder. Going from rung one to two is just as important as going from rungs 20 to 21.”

Eden’s seder proves that this principle doesn’t only apply to Jews. He said that the family’s Roman Catholic friends have begun to join the Seder as a tradition. Now they learn about the history of the Jewish people, too.

In fact, Eden said, they have brought something of the utmost importance to the annual meal.

“We always had a delicious sponge cake that my cousin made, and the wife [of the Catholic couple] makes the cake and it’s amazing. She really knocks it out of the park and makes it a replication of what my cousin made.”

Kaplan said that people should worship how they want, but he is committed to preserving tradition.

“I think whatever you can pass on to each generation is good,” Kaplan said.

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