Please don’t tell me I’m fine… it’s not nice!

I have a few linguistic triggers. Not actual trauma triggers. Nobody needs to lower the lights, remove sharp objects, or summon a professional. These are simply words that make me wonder whether the English language, after centuries of Shakespeare, Austen, Wilde and Dorothy Parker, has finally packed a small bag and left.

The worst is fine. Ask someone how they are, and they say, “Fine.” No, you’re not. Nobody is fine. Fine is what we say when the truth would require a chair, coffee, and substantially more intimacy than we had planned for the encounter. Fine means: I am functioning sufficiently well that I don’t want to explain myself to you. Fine is emotional economy class. You will probably reach the destination, but nobody is enjoying the journey and your knees are somewhere around your ears.

Then there is nice. “You look nice,” I beg your pardon? I have showered, moisturized, blow-dried, excavated the wardrobe, rejected eleven outfits, reconsidered my relationship with carbohydrates and applied enough cosmetics to qualify as minor restoration work, and I look nice? Flowers are nice. A cup of tea is nice. The woman at the pharmacy who remembers your name is nice. I was aiming for magnificent, arresting, possibly dangerous. Nice suggests I could safely be introduced to your aunt.

“Dinner was nice” is worse. Get out. I chopped, seasoned, roasted and dirtied fourteen things that now require washing. You may call dinner delicious, extraordinary, interesting, overcooked, underseasoned or an ambitious failure. You may tell me the aubergine frightened you, and you would prefer not to encounter it in that form again. At least we have something to discuss. But nice? Nice is what you say when food has passed through your mouth without causing either ecstasy or hospitalization. Nice is beige wearing a cardigan.

Then I looked at what we read tomorrow morning in Israel and discovered, to my enormous satisfaction, that Torah has no interest in being fine or nice either. We reach Vezot Haberakhah, the end of the entire Torah. After forty years of Pharaoh, plagues, Sinai, manna, rebellion, golden calves, spies, Korach, wars, miracles, and several million Jews asking Moshe whether he has considered doing absolutely everything differently, he finally gets them to the border of Israel.

G-D takes Moshe up Mount Nebo and shows him the Land. There it is, the destination towards which his adult life has been moving, the place he has spent forty years trying to reach, presumably looking considerably better after four decades of sand. Moshe gets the full panoramic view and then dies. Fine. Absolutely bloody fine. The man has spent forty years trying to get to Israel and receives what amounts to the world’s most consequential property viewing: lovely aspect, excellent location, tremendous historical significance, regrettably, possession is not available.

And what is this final parashah called? Vezot Haberakhah. “And this is the blessing.” The Torah has chutzpah. If somebody told me that being shown the thing I had devoted my life to reaching immediately before being prevented from reaching it constituted a blessing, I would require clarification, preferably in writing and with an appeals procedure.

Yet before Moshe dies, he does something extraordinary. He blesses the people who will get what he won’t. These are the same people he has dragged, cajoled, rebuked, defended, and repeatedly rescued from themselves. They are about to cross the Jordan without him, and his final act towards them is blessing. I am not certain I possess this level of spiritual maturity. There would almost certainly have been an exit interview first, possibly a PowerPoint entitled FORTY YEARS: SOME FEEDBACK, with an appendix devoted entirely to the golden calf.

Nevertheless, Moshe blesses them, and that is neither fine nor nice. It is good, which is where I think we have made a linguistic and possibly philosophical mess of things. Fine means tolerable. Nice means pleasant. Good is much more demanding. A thing can be good without being comfortable, easy, pretty, or remotely what we ordered.

We expect good things to feel good. We expect a good life to proceed nicely. We expect effort to produce reward, love to produce reciprocation, decency to produce justice, and forty years of schlepping Jews through a desert to produce, at minimum, a weekend in Jerusalem. Moshe’s life refuses to cooperate. His ending is heartbreaking, and his life is magnificent. Neither fact cancels the other, however inconvenient that may be for people who prefer their philosophy available on decorative cushions.

Then Judaism does something narratively insane. We finish the Torah and immediately start again. Moshe dies, and within minutes we are back at Bereishit bara Elokim, “In the beginning, G-D created.” There is no interval, no bereavement leave, no tasteful fade to black, and apparently no concern whatsoever for narrative whiplash. We go from the death of the greatest prophet in Torah to Day One of Creation before the congregation has had time to locate the kiddush.

And this brand-new beginning isn’t particularly tidy either. The earth is tohu va-vohu, traditionally rendered as formless and void, with darkness over the deep. In other words, G-D does not begin Creation with a pristine universe, labelled storage containers and a spreadsheet. This is comforting to those of us whose personal organisational systems occasionally depend upon remembering which pile something is under.

We tend to imagine beginnings should arrive clean. Fresh year, fresh relationship, fresh job, fresh notebook, fresh me, preferably accompanied by color-coded stationery and no emotional debris from the previous administration. Bereishit gives us the opposite. There is darkness. Things are unformed. Boundaries have not yet been drawn. G-D starts separating: light from darkness, waters from waters, sea from land. Things are named, divided, shaped and brought into being. Apparently even Creation required sorting out the mess before anybody could start accessorizing.

Then comes the word I love: tov. Good. G-D creates light and sees that it is good. Land and vegetation are good. The celestial bodies are good. The creatures are good. Eventually He surveys the entire extraordinary enterprise, including the newly manufactured human beings who will shortly ignore the one prohibition they have been given, discover nudity, hide in shrubbery, blame each other, and produce a murderer in the first generation of children, and declares the whole thing very good. One imagines Quality Control clearing its throat and quietly asking whether He would like another twenty-four hours before signing off.

Because Creation is demonstrably not perfect. It isn’t even going to remain peaceful for another few chapters. Adam and Eve disobey. Adam blames Eve; Eve blames the serpent; thus, humanity invents both sin and management before leaving the garden. Cain kills Abel. Things deteriorate with such efficiency that by Noah G-D is contemplating what looks suspiciously like a factory reset. If this is very good, then tov is clearly carrying considerably more theological weight than “nice”.

Perhaps “good” was never supposed to mean “perfect”. That would explain rather a lot. Good can hurt. It can contain disappointment, failure and grief. It can include freedom, which unfortunately includes the freedom to behave like an absolute idiot and then provide a compelling explanation for why somebody else caused it. Good can be unfinished. Fine cannot do any of this because fine is designed to stop the conversation before anybody accidentally tells the truth.

Ask how someone is, how the relationship is going, how work is going, how they’re coping, and “fine” closes the door before anything inconvenient can escape. Ask how Israel is and the word becomes positively deranged. Israel has never been fine. Israel is magnificent, maddening, traumatized, miraculous, infuriating, beautiful, bureaucratic, brilliant, frightened, argumentative and constitutionally incapable of conducting any national conversation below shouting volume.

Israel is a country where a stranger can scream at you because you have blocked his car, help you push yours when the battery dies, explain what is wrong with your government, your driving and possibly your children, then invite you to his mother’s for Friday night because apparently boundaries were another casualty of exile. We revived an ancient language and immediately used it to argue about parking, politics, and who was here first. Whatever Israel is, fine is an insult.

So is fine when applied to people. I can be grateful and disappointed at exactly the same time. I can love someone and know they are wrong for me. I can miss someone I have absolutely no intention of inviting back. I can forgive and still refuse access. I can make the right decision and hate what it cost me. I can adore Israel and be furious with its government. I can grieve and laugh five minutes later without either emotion filing a complaint about the other.

We contain contradictions because life contains contradictions, and Torah seems remarkably untroubled by this. Moshe succeeds and loses; he reaches the destination and doesn’t. He dies after blessing the people who will continue without him. Israel mourns him; we finish the Torah and, on one of the happiest days of the Jewish year, immediately begin again. Judaism does not appear particularly interested in resolving the contradiction before allowing us to dance. Apparently emotional consistency is not a halachic requirement.

That is far more interesting to me than positivity. I don’t particularly want to be taught how to feel better. I want to become capable of feeling more: joy without deleting grief, gratitude without pretending disappointment has disappeared, hope without requiring amnesia and a beginning that doesn’t demand that I lie about the ending that came before it. “Think positive” has always struck me as something one says when “I have absolutely no idea what to do with your pain” seems impolite.

Which brings me to closure, another word I increasingly distrust. We are told to move on, let go, find closure, and accept that everything happens for a reason. Occasionally I think these sentences should be punishable by confiscation of dessert. If everything happens for a reason, I would like several reasons itemized, cross-referenced and submitted before close of business.

Sometimes terrible things happen and remain terrible. October 7 will never be fine. The death of someone you love does not become nice because eventually you laugh again. Betrayal does not become acceptable because you learned something from it, and pain does not become worthwhile merely because you managed to make something worthwhile afterwards. Meaning is not detergent. It doesn’t travel backwards through time removing the stain.

Bereishit does not go backwards and fix Vezot Haberakhah. It comes after it. Moshe remains dead, and he still doesn’t enter Israel. Beginning again changes none of that; it simply refuses to give the ending ownership of everything that comes next. There is something almost insolent about that idea, which is probably why I like it.

Perhaps that is what I have misunderstood about closure for most of my life. I thought that before I could begin again, I had to finish properly: understand what happened, resolve the relationship, get the explanation, receive the apology, know why, tie the bow, and ideally have the other person finally recognize that I was right. One should maintain standards. I have occasionally pursued closure with such enthusiasm that closure itself probably considered taking out a restraining order.

But Torah doesn’t close neatly. The greatest prophet in Jewish history dies with unfinished business, and then we start again anyway. Maybe closure isn’t the prerequisite for a beginning that I thought it was. Maybe some things aren’t solved; they are reread, which is considerably less satisfying but has the irritating advantage of resembling life.

We return to old grief as different people, and to old love, old mistakes and old dreams. Occasionally we return to old men, although the Torah offers no explicit instruction to do so, and experience suggests we should exercise substantially greater caution in doing so. Something I once understood purely as catastrophe may eventually contain information. Something I called failure may become direction. Something I desperately wanted to finish may simply stop determining what happens next. Some things remain awful, but I am no longer exactly the same woman meeting them.

That is why fine bothers me so much. Fine is static; nothing further need be said. Nice is worse because nice asks nothing at all. Torah asks everything. It asks us to look at Moshe’s death and still call his life blessed. It gives us darkness without pretending darkness is light, goodness without promising comfort, and grief and joy occupying the same morning without anybody suggesting one of them wait outside.

Tomorrow morning we reach the final words of Torah with Moshe dead and his greatest personal dream unrealized. Neither is fine, and there is nothing nice about either. Then we close the scroll, open another and find darkness, an unformed world and possibility. G-D begins. Eventually He looks at what He has made: not perfect, not painless, not safe, not finished and certainly not beige, but good.

Perhaps that is the standard I actually want. Not a fine life, please G-D, anything but that, and not a nice one either. Give me one with some bloody adjectives. Give me joy and grief, mistakes and reinvention, people worth missing, work worth failing at, love worth risking and arguments worth having. Give me a country worth fighting with because it is worth fighting for. Give me darkness in which I can still recognize light, endings that don’t require me to lie about what they cost, and the chutzpah to begin again before everything is resolved.

Give me tohu va-vohu if necessary; I’ll see what I can make from it. And if, after all that, you look at me and tell me I look nice, I swear I’m going back to Deuteronomy.