Your husband goes out to pick up your daughter which he’s not thrilled about in the first place. He’s running late for an important something. When he gets there your daughter isn’t ready and the private teacher says it’ll be another ten minutes. Your husband is waiting in the freezing cold and the heater’s not working.

What’s the best way to ask your husband if he can wait an extra ten minutes?

1. “You have to wait another ten minutes for Suri. She’s not finished yet.” Clunk.

2. “Hello Dear. I know it’s hard. If you can’t wait tell me I’ll arrange something else.” (This option includes the “it’ll cost money” intonation.)

3. “You have an extra three minutes to wait?”

4. “Hi. I heard you’re waiting in the cold. Suri’s teacher says it will be another ten minutes. What should we do?”

Down Payment

You finally find the perfect home after looking for five years. Your father had gladly offered to help with a down payment but that was a long time ago. It’s extremely uncomfortable to bring up the subject so much later down the road.

What is the best way to open up this subject?

1. “Hi Dad. We’ve found the perfect home. I need that money you promised for the down payment. Within 24 hours.”

2. “Hi Dad. Oh my gosh! You won’t believe this house we found. You’d faint if you saw it. It’s ‘it’! You have to come right now to see it before someone else takes it. Do you think you can go to the bank and take out $50000?”

3. “Good morning Dad. Remember you promised bli neder of course to pay the down payment for our new home? Well we found it. It’s Yossi’s cousin’s brother’s sister’s house and he’s willing to give us 15 percent off for cash down.”

4. “Hi Dad. How are you?” (Space for response.) “Today we went looking for houses and we saw a very nice one with good potential.” (Space for response.) “How should we work this?”

Bad Haircut

Your sister comes home with a new not-good haircut. A chop. She’s in tears. She asks you how she looks.

What is the best way to answer this question?

1. “Amazing!”

2. “Did you pay for that?”

3. “It’ll grow back.”

4. “It’s not the greatest but with your smile any cut’s good.”

Multiple choice exams were always the most challenging.

Somehow it could always be two or more of the answers if you thought deeply enough and turned the question around and around.

So many times the answer on those exams looked so simple I couldn’t imagine it could actually be the correct one. I would think It has to be more complicated or difficult than this! It must be a trick question!

When I got the exams back I was always shocked. The simple straightforward answers had actually been the right ones.

Today I see that the more simple less difficult and less complicated option is usually the answer. When we complicate things we usually get what my friend describes as the “Heavenly Buzzer ” which lets us know we’ve circled the wrong answer.

It’s true Torah has 70 paths to get to the point of truth.

But what doesn’t change what only has one choice is Truth.

There is only one Truth. How we go about getting to it how complicated obscure and intricate we make it — these are our tests of multiple choices.