There are no accidents

There are no accidents is Rabbi Kaplowitz’s answer to the uncertainty surrounding Chaim Lerner’s death. Rather than decide whether Chaim fell, took his own life, or was killed, Kaplowitz treats the manner of death as secondary to a governing divine will. The claim offers a total explanation, but its certainty stands against the novel’s unresolved evidence and Chaim’s own more complicated understanding of God, suffering, and survival.

The Claim in the Tunnel

When Judah Loeb asks whether Chaim’s death was an accident, Rabbi Kaplowitz answers, “There are no accidents. Especially here in this holy land, in this holy city.” His assertion links the principle to place: in Jerusalem, which he regards as holy, events cannot be merely contingent. He then interprets Chaim’s death as an act of God, saying, “God gives and God takes.” For Kaplowitz, the death is not an unexplained interruption in human affairs but an expression of divine agency.

The exchange takes place as Kaplowitz mourns Chaim and praises him as a brilliant thinker, a lover of Israel, and a generous person who survived the Shoah and guided others through terrible experiences. The doctrine therefore does not arise as abstract speculation alone. It gives Kaplowitz a way to speak about the death of someone he loved and admired. But the comfort of a single explanation comes at a cost: it turns a painful, disputed loss into something already decided by God.

Divine Will Versus Human Investigation

Judah’s questions retain the practical distinctions that Kaplowitz dismisses. He asks whether God pushed Chaim from the balcony, and Kaplowitz replies that a wind, murder, suicide, or drunken stumble would be “mere details” to him. These possibilities are not equivalent for earthly investigators; each would imply a different account of Chaim’s final moments. Kaplowitz’s position instead places them beneath a more encompassing answer: “For me, there is only one answer. It was the will of God.” The contrast is between a search for the means and circumstances of death and a theological interpretation that claims those circumstances cannot alter its ultimate meaning.

Kaplowitz’s certainty also emerges alongside his grief, rather than replacing it. His eyes fill with tears as he speaks. After declaring the death God’s will, he breathes deeply and slowly, then twists his lips upward until his naturally joyful expression returns. The movement from mourning to gladness makes visible the emotional work his belief performs. The doctrine gives grief a frame, but the scene does not present that frame as proof of what physically happened.

The Evidence That Resists Certainty

The novel surrounds the death with facts that invite competing explanations. During the week he died, Chaim was making plans: he had signed a contract for another book, bought plane tickets to Italy with his wife, and agreed to teach a new course at Hebrew University. His dean later found a syllabus and lecture notes among the papers on his desk. People who knew him described him as joyful, loving, and enthusiastic, and one repeated judgment was that he was the last person they would expect to die by suicide. These details make a simple account of deliberate self-destruction difficult, but they do not settle the question of his death.

The opposing possibility is also given weight. Chaim had experienced depression, aging, bereavement, and physical pain in his knee and hip. Some influential writers interpreted his death through the accumulated burden of Holocaust trauma, describing him as another Holocaust writer whose capacity to witness horror had become unbearable. The novel sets these interpretations beside the future-oriented plans and the testimony of those who remembered his happiness. Kaplowitz’s “no accidents” does not resolve that conflict by weighing the evidence; it changes the terms of the inquiry, treating the unresolved manner of death as less important than its place within providence.

Chaim’s More Ambivalent Theology

Chaim’s writing gives the idea of divine purpose a different, less conclusive shape. In “Moments of Reprieve,” he recalls a fellow prisoner sharing a stolen slice of apple. The sweetness, crunch, juice, and brief easing of hunger become a miracle that makes it difficult for him to deny God. In his account of the episode, divine presence is encountered in a particular, fragile experience of bodily relief—not offered as a complete explanation for suffering or for every death.

His account of survival is similarly resistant to a neat moral formula. In an interview conducted less than a month before his fall, Chaim attributes survival partly to luck, his knowledge of German, and the fact that his training as a chemist helped him at selection, though he did no chemistry in the camp. He also discusses chayut, a mystical life force he believes God grants to some people. Yet he insists that this is not reward for virtue: his father and brother, whom he considers better men than himself, did not survive. He calls chayut ultimately meaningless and still important to him. That tension differs sharply from Kaplowitz’s confident reading of Chaim’s death as a deliberate divine act. Chaim’s theology allows for gratitude and mystery without claiming that survival or suffering can be neatly explained.

Narrative Significance

The claim that there are no accidents functions as one answer in a novel built around the question of what caused Chaim’s death. Its force comes partly from its refusal to distinguish among accident, suicide, murder, and divine intervention; what an investigator would regard as decisive, Kaplowitz recasts as detail. The statement offers spiritual certainty where the evidence remains inconclusive, but it cannot erase the competing accounts or establish which physical explanation is true.

That gap matters because the novel juxtaposes the claim with Chaim’s public and private legacies: his joyful recollections of moments of reprieve, his writings on faith, and the plans he was making for a future that did not arrive. Kaplowitz’s belief preserves divine agency by making even the death an act of will. Chaim’s own reflections, by contrast, find sacredness in the small gift of an apple while admitting that the distribution of life and death can remain without a comprehensible reason. The phrase therefore names not a settled solution to the mystery, but the sharpest conflict between providential certainty and the human demand to know what happened.