Nobody’s any better than the next person

“Nobody’s any better than the next person” is Boaz Brandstetter’s answer when Ilana Sommo asks whether she has wronged Michel Sommo. Its force lies in refusing the superior position from which one person might pronounce another uniquely guilty or uniquely sane. Boaz repeats the thought in a changed form, turning a moral judgment into a question of who gets to define sanity.

The Phrase in Conversation

The expression occurs in an intimate exchange after Ilana describes Michel’s anger over the divorce proceedings and the ruling that she is a rebellious wife, which bars her from seeing Yifat. Boaz first advises her to let Michel’s anger spend itself; when she asks directly whether she wronged him, he answers, “Nobody’s any better than the next person.” The line offers no verdict on the particulars of the marriage or the legal dispute. Instead, it declines to separate the person asking from the people she might judge.

Ilana then asks Boaz whether he thinks she is mad. He answers, “Nobody’s more sane than the next person,” and immediately asks whether she feels like sorting seeds. The variation is important: the first line levels moral standing, while the second extends that refusal of ranking to mental normality. Boaz does not diagnose Ilana or reassure her with a claim that she is entirely well. He shifts from the demand for a judgment to a modest, shared activity. When Ilana asks whom he is making a merry-go-round for, he says it is for the little one, when she comes back. The exchange moves from accusation and self-doubt toward work and an anticipated return.

Equality Without Exoneration

The phrase appears against a record of deception that neither Boaz nor the surrounding letters make simple. Ilana admits that the details in her first letters to Alexander Gideon about Boaz were accurate, yet says she used them to set a trap: she expected Michel, not Alexander, to rescue Boaz, and believed Michel would act rightly even without Alexander’s money. Later, she acknowledges that she is deceiving Michel just as she deceived Alexander during much of her first marriage. Her candor exposes both her manipulation and the attachments that shaped it; the expression’s refusal to rank people does not erase the consequences of what they do.

Alexander’s correspondence supplies a different version of the same difficulty. He presses Ilana about her earlier resistance to a tissue test that might have established whether he was Boaz’s biological father, and asks what her changing position now means. In a later account to Michel, Alexander recalls his marriage to Ilana, his reluctance to become a father, their delayed separation, and the vindictiveness of their divorce. These admissions make judgment inseparable from incomplete knowledge and acknowledged failure. Against that background, Boaz’s generalization is less a defense of any single act than a refusal to claim that one person stands outside the shared capacity for error.

Uncertainty and the Limits of Judgment

The letters repeatedly unsettle confidence about what can be known. Ilana distinguishes the accuracy of her account of Boaz’s troubles from the deception behind her appeal. Alexander, meanwhile, raises the unresolved question of Boaz’s paternity and later describes his own account of Ilana’s nighttime visits as uncertain, conceding that the scenes may belong to fantasy rather than verifiable events. The claims differ in kind, but each places pressure on the impulse to turn partial knowledge into a final judgment of another person.

Boaz’s second formulation, about sanity, gives that pressure its sharpest expression. It does not resolve Ilana’s uncertainty about herself; it makes the category of normality less secure as a weapon or verdict. His reply is notably practical rather than analytical: he invites her to sort seeds, then speaks of preparing something for Yifat’s return. The expression’s humane breadth comes with a limit: it cannot decide who was right in the marriage, who should bear its consequences, or what the law should permit. It can, however, interrupt the demand that one person be declared wholly better, worse, sane, or mad than everyone else.