Romi, Matan, and the Myth of the Hollywood Ending

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Protesting Happy endings

 I don’t really know what to do with the language of “happy endings” anymore—though if I’m honest, I was never much of a happy-ending kind of girl. By temperament I’m an optimist; in my soul I’m more of an existentialist. I identify with stripey people: the ones who can live between things rather than retreating into solidified, compartmentalised ways of being. There is something more real, more raw, when we make space for light and dark, grief and joy, bitter and sweet. Maybe that’s why old-school, sugar-coated American Hollywood never really spoke to me.

But now more than ever those neatly tied endings feel not only unconvincing, but almost indecent—so far from authentic reality that even Hollywood itself seems to have put them out to dry.

This week, Israeli reality echoed my stripey instinct. It offered two scenes that sit in the same frame and refuse to merge.

On the one hand: Matan Zangauker, one of the hostages, getting engaged. A young couple daring to say: we are still here, we are still choosing, we are still building. And then the line from Matan’s mother Einav—raw, unfiltered, morally complicated in its intensity: “This is my revenge on Hamas.” Not revenge in the childish sense of a fantasy of dominance, but revenge as life affirming: you tried to end our story, and we will insist on continuing it.

On the other hand: the revelations about the sexual abuse perpetrated by Hamas against Romi Gonen. And her words that have haunted all who listened to them as she described looking out of a tiny window and seeing ordinary life—sky, birds, continuity—while she herself was being abused in unimaginable ways. The power of that image lies precisely in its ordinariness. Nothing dramatic, nothing symbolic. Just the unbearable fact that normality and horror can exist side by side. A single sentence that captures the sickest feature of trauma: the split-screen. The world continues. The sky remains blue. People buy coffee. And someone is being erased, violated, buried alive inside their own body.

There was a day—mid-October 2025—when many Israelis tasted something like a Hollywood ending. Hostages were finally coming home. The last living captives were being released as part of a ceasefire that was spoken about, publicly, as “the end” of the war. President Trump flew in on Air Force One, did a dramatic flyover of Hostages Square, the choreography of closure was immaculate. But even then—especially then—many of us couldn’t inhabit the euphoria without fracture. Because we knew what a “war ending” doesn’t end: the parents who will never kiss their children again; the homes that will never be homes again; the bodies that didn’t return with the living; the scar of October 7th that will not simply “heal” because a headline changes.

And now, two-and-a-half months later, that dissonance hasn’t faded. If anything it has sharpened. The illusion of a neat narrative arc—evil defeated, good rewarded, curtain call—has collapsed under the weight of the truth: nothing about this is Disney, and nothing about this is happily ever after. It is painfully stripey.

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Dialectical Faith

I keep thinking about my teacher, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, and his post-Holocaust theology of what he calls dialectical faith. After the Holocaust, he argues, you can no longer speak about God—or about history—as if they resolve into a single, coherent script. Faith cannot be sealed into tidy cognitive or religious boxes. After the Shoah, we are fated to oscillate between images that refuse to reconcile: the burning child and the waving flag of the modern State of Israel; destruction and redemption.

Hollywood works precisely because we crave endings that resolve experience into a clean arc. But grown up life and faith don’t work that way.

That is why Parashat Vayechi feels so honest this year. It is the Torah’s refusal to offer us the comfort of closure and it does so through three scenes in the parsha.

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Stripey Endings

In the opening of our parsha, Yaakov speaks to Yosef weaving three strands of his life story. First, he recalls God’s promise of the land. Second, he notes—almost with wonder—that Ephraim and Menashe were born without his knowledge. And third, most strangely, he returns to something Yosef surely already knows: the death of Rachel. “When I came from Paddan,” he says, “Rachel died on me… on the road… and I buried her there.” (Bereishit 48:7)

I think these three elements expose the central tension of Yaakov’s life—and, in many ways, of ours. He begins with covenantal certainty and ends with personal catastrophe: מתה עלי רחל—Rachel died upon me. What he describes here is collapse of all coherent structures in his life. Rachel dies ON HIM, with her his world comes crashing down. After her death Yosef held the key to her continuity, then he too is taken. But between the Divine promise and Rachel’s something is unfolding unbeknown to him, the birth of Ephraim and Menashe: the unknown future quietly taking shape.

Two realities are being held at once. Yaakov mourns Rachel and believes Yosef is gone; yet in a parallel reality Yosef is alive, children are being born, legacy is being nurtured. Death and life, past and future, knowing and not knowing.  That is Vayechi’s first refusal of the Hollywood arc: the end of one story is not the end of reality. While Yaakov is convinced Yosef is gone, Yosef is alive, building a future, fathering children. There are always multiple layers of reality occurring at once—some visible, some hidden. And hope, in the Torah, is often the discipline of remembering that our perception is not the full story.

But Yaakov’s resistance to closure appears in another place too: his refusal to be comforted “וַיְמָאֵן לְהִתְנַחֵם” — “and he refused to be comforted.” (37:35) after Yosef disappears. Chazal suggest that one cannot truly be consoled for someone who is still alive. But psychologically, there is something else at work: Yaakov does not want to metabolise the pain into ordinary life. He does not want to get used to it. He refuses the cheap mercy of numbness.

Camus describes something similar in The Plague: people “adapt themselves,” as they say—because there is no other way. And then comes his devastating line: the most disheartening thing is not despair itself, but the habit of despair. The danger is not only suffering, but the way suffering can become routine—normalised, domesticated, absorbed into the furniture of life. Yaakov refuses that. He will not let his loss become administratively manageable. Like Camus’ Oran, he lives in the tension between survival and the moral cost of adaptation. He insists that the rupture must remain a rupture.

And then the Torah makes its boldest anti-Hollywood move: Yaakov gathers his sons and says he will tell them what will happen “באחרית הימים”—the end of days. Finally, the “happy ending”, the comfort of knowing the final scene, the redemption that will come.  

But he can’t. Rashi famously says the Shechinah (Divine presence) departs. The future is withheld. The ending is denied.

Why? Because Judaism is not a religion of cinematic closure. It is a covenantal faith lived without the comfort of knowing how the story resolves. In place of prediction, Yaakov gives his sons blessings implying it is not important to know how it will end, but rather about how to live. We are not a religion of salvation, rather redemption. The end, the Torah implies, is less important than the means. Redemption is built—slowly, painfully—through character, responsibility, and unity.

Which brings us to Yosef’s final request: take my bones with you when you leave Egypt. It is an act of radical hope. Not optimism—hope. It is Yosef saying: there will be an “after,” even if you can’t see it yet. You need to ACT to bring it about and when you do you will carry me and the promise, through the wilderness.

Vayichi doesn’t tie the story into a neat bow. It does something harder—and more honest: it offers a stripey ending. An ending that leaves the door open for courage: the courage to live without closure, and to refuse to call exile the final chapter. It reminds us that real life is lived in between—dark and light, hope and despair, pain and joy. That our lives are more than what we can see in the here and now. That even as we mourn in one dimension of reality, somewhere else an Ephraim and Menashe—the next generation, the future we cannot yet see—is quietly flourishing.

No fairytale. No Hollywood.Just covenant—and the stubborn, sacred work of hope.

Shabbat Shalom

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