There is no why

There is no why is the book’s compact answer to a question that keeps returning after suicide: why did the person do it, and what explanation could make the loss intelligible? Chaim Lerner uses the phrase when discussing Holocaust writers who took their own lives; years later, Hannah Loeb recasts the same refusal while she and Judah Loeb read the note Mary Loeb left behind. The phrase does not solve either death. It marks the point at which the demand for a complete reason fails.

Chaim Lerner’s formulation

In an interview conducted on Chaim Lerner’s balcony less than a month before his fall, he is asked about survivors who were said to possess chayut and about Holocaust writers who died by suicide. The question invokes the “Paul Celan syndrome,” linking survivor, poet, and suicide. Lerner pauses before answering, making the silence part of the exchange rather than moving directly to an explanation.

Lerner asks whether writing exposes the depths of human evil at a cost to the writer, then turns to what he sees as a stark absence: the writers he discusses left no suicide notes. Their work, he suggests, may be their note. When the interviewer hears criticism in this observation, Lerner denies that he is judging them. The Holocaust, he says, leaves him without judgments of conscience; he is asking questions, including why there was no note. His conclusion is deliberately limited: “Sometimes, there is no why.” The interview’s proximity to his own fall lends the statement an unsettling resonance, but the passage does not present it as an explanation of his death.

Mary Loeb’s note and the returning question

The expression returns in Judah’s account of reading the message Mary left for him and Hannah. Hannah had withheld it for twenty-seven years. Judah says the note was short enough to memorize after a single reading; its opening address to him and his daughter initially stirs love, longing, and melancholy, but those feelings give way to irritation and incomprehension.

Judah objects to the note’s requests that they be strong for each other and help each other, asking what choice they had. He also cannot understand what Mary means by saying that tragedy had moved in, or why she believed her suicide would make things easier for them. He recalls that she had spent six months in rehabilitation and that there were treatments they had not tried, although her chances were poor and the treatments difficult. Hannah had been five during that painful year, and Judah remembers her as having helped both parents endure it. These particulars sharpen his objection: he does not experience the note as a sufficient explanation of a decision that shaped the family’s life.

Five minutes after handing him the note, Hannah smiles as Judah continues to ask why. He describes the smile through two comparisons, to the Mona Lisa and to Buddha. Hannah tells him, “‘Why’ is not the right question,” then touches his finger and adds, “It was never the right question.” Her response does not supply another account of Mary’s motives. Instead, it challenges the premise that a bereaved reader can recover a decisive answer from the note.

Function and significance

The phrase changes slightly as it passes between speakers. Lerner’s “Sometimes, there is no why” follows questions about missing suicide notes and the limits of moral judgment after the Holocaust. Hannah’s reply is more direct: rather than affirming that an answer is unavailable, she questions whether why is the right inquiry at all. The distinction preserves both the ache of Judah’s unanswered questions and the possibility that explanation is not the only way to approach a death.

The phrase also links an interview preserved in Judah’s book, Here There Is No Why: The Death and Life of Chaim Lerner, with the intimate scene in which Judah and Hannah confront Mary’s message. In both, a text seems to invite interpretation—the writers’ work in Lerner’s account, Mary’s brief note in Judah’s—but neither becomes a transparent key to the suicide it follows. There is no why names that limit without erasing the need to ask, remember, and read.