No-single-cause principle

The No-single-cause principle is the recurring idea that some human choices and unanswered questions cannot be reduced to a single, satisfying explanation. Its clearest formulation, “Sometimes there is no why,” first appears when Michal explains that she loves both Judah Loeb and Yoav Lerner but has chosen to marry Yoav. The phrase returns when Hannah confronts an unexplained email from a bomber. Across these different situations, it does not erase the questions people ask; it marks the point at which an answer may remain unavailable.

A choice that resists explanation

At two in the morning, after Judah asks whether Michal is marrying Yoav out of pity because she saw him helpless in the hospital, she insists that pity is not the reason. She says she loves Judah, but loves Yoav too; she fought against that realization, but could not defeat it. When Judah observes that she loves Yoav more, Michal does not answer in words, but nods slightly. The exchange gives the decision a concrete emotional context before it reaches the principle’s spare formulation.

Judah asks why, and immediately recognizes the question as possibly foolish: love, he reflects, may not yield the sort of reason the question demands. Michal answers dry-eyed and clearly, “Sometimes there is no why.” The reply does not deny what has happened or conceal the choice. It follows Michal’s account of loving two people and choosing one, while refusing to turn that account into a further, definitive cause. The explanation is both intimate and incomplete: Judah learns whom Michal has chosen, but not a reason that could make the loss intelligible or negotiable.

The scene’s different forms of answer matter. Michal’s slight nod confirms Judah’s reading of her feelings; her spoken reply to his next question sets a limit on what confirmation can provide. A sign can establish that he has understood her preference, but it cannot explain why love has taken this shape. The principle therefore emerges not as a detached maxim but at the precise point where Judah seeks a cause for a decision whose consequences he must face.

The question and its cost

The conversation is set against the approaching end of Judah and Michal’s relationship. Judah has asked for an explanation, but the answer does not soften the choice. Soon afterward, he tries to continue his year in Israel: he gets out of bed, attends classes, goes drinking with Charlie in Jerusalem’s bars, and joins American students playing ultimate frisbee in Sacher Park. In the cafeteria he even speaks up in political arguments. Yet he understands this activity as mimicked renewal. He is devastated, and the absence of Michal’s face in his daily life feels like a blow to the chest.

That aftermath sharpens the distinction between having information and receiving relief. Judah knows Michal loves Yoav more and that she intends to marry him; what he lacks is a reason that could reconcile him to the loss. Talking about Michal temporarily eases the pain, but he soon bores Charlie with his story, and no one else knows their history. The phrase does not solve this loneliness. Instead, its plainness stands against the effort to make heartbreak narratively tidy: knowing the decision does not make its emotional meaning easy to bear.

A phrase that returns

The same wording recurs when Hannah identifies an email’s writer as her bomber. Judah asks how the bomber can send email and why he is writing to her. Hannah shrugs and replies, “How am I supposed to know? Sometimes there is no why. Do you want to hear it?” Here the phrase shifts from an explanation of romantic choice to a response to an unanswered question about a communication whose circumstances Judah cannot understand.

The surrounding action complicates any reading of the phrase as indifference. Judah wants Hannah to delete the email immediately, but does not say so; he knows she will read the whole thing aloud regardless. He nods and leans in. Hannah’s reply does not prevent the reading, and the available scene does not establish what the email will explain. Rather, the phrase accompanies the decision to hear the message despite not knowing why it was sent. The principle can acknowledge uncertainty without ending attention or inquiry.

Meaning and limits

The recurrence gives the phrase a double edge. In Michal’s conversation, it names the limits of explanation in love; in Hannah’s, it answers a question about an email from a bomber. Neither use demonstrates that events have no causes. The narrower claim supported by the scenes is that the people asking may not have access to a reason that would settle their question. In the first case, Michal speaks from inside her own feelings; in the second, Hannah explicitly asks how she could know the sender’s purpose.

The phrase’s repetition also links private hurt to unresolved uncertainty without making the two situations equivalent. Judah’s question comes from the pain of losing Michal, while his later questions concern an email Hannah is about to read. In both scenes, a demand for explanation meets the same concise refusal of certainty. The title Here There Is No Why, identified as a 2005 work by Judah Loeb, gives that refusal a broader resonance in the book, but the episodes keep its meaning grounded in particular encounters. The principle offers no consolation that every loss will become understandable. It instead distinguishes what can be stated—the choice, the email, the fact of not knowing—from the further cause the questioner wants and may not receive.