‘Succession,’ ‘Barry’ and the Very
Jewish Nature of Unresolved Endings
Rabbi David Bashevkin
O ver the past few weeks, a lot of sad
faces were peering at their screens as two
popular television shows came to an end.

Two HBO staples, “Succession” and “Barry,” aired
their season finales in late May.

And as happens with all high-drama prestige
television, the debates began the moment the
episode was over. Did Kendall deserve what he
got? Was justice served for Mr. Cousineau? Without
revealing any details, it is fair to say that many fans
were left with that gnawing feeling of an unresolved
ending. TV endings were not always this way. Decades
before “The Sopranos” famously concluded with its
cut to black, shows typically concluded with a nice
emotional ribbon — loose ends tied up, characters
discovering the promised land. On “Cheers,” Sam
returned to his bar. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”
ended with an actual group hug. On “Friends,” Ross
and Rachel finally got together. “M*A*S*H,” still the
most watched television finale of all time, ended with
the main character finally returning home, wistfully
looking from a helicopter to the word “goodbye”
spelled out in stone. The episode was aptly titled,
“Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen.”
Then everything got darker and grittier. Today, TV
fans have come to expect unsettling, unresolved and
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greatest danger facing Jewish Americans. As
President Biden said in his opening remarks when
the national strategy was unveiled: “Our intelligence
agencies have determined that domestic terrorism
rooted in white supremacy — including antisemitism
— is the greatest terrorist threat to our homeland
today.” “We can’t take on white supremacy, xenophobia,
anti-LGBTQ hate or any form of hate without taking
on the antisemitism that helps animate it,” says
Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for
Public Affairs and former head of Integrity First for
America, which successfully sued the neo-Nazis who
organized the deadly 2017 Charlottesville march.

“And likewise, we can’t take on antisemitism without
taking on white supremacy or these other forms of
even unhinged endings to their favorite shows. I am
here to say that such conclusions are quintessen-
tially Jewish. The Torah itself is an ode to unresolved
endings. As you may already know, the Torah concludes
(spoiler alert!) with the death of Moses on the edge
of the promised land. I take it for granted now, but
imagine reading this for the first time. What?! The
leader of the Jewish people, who brought them out
of Egypt, received the Torah on Sinai and led them
through the desert for 40 years doesn’t live happily
ever after in the promised land?
If the Torah were an HBO show, fans would have
been outraged. Shouldn’t the final scene have seen
Moses walking arm and arm with the Jewish people
across the Jordan River, the sun slowly setting as
the credits roll? Instead, we are left with our beloved
leader buried right outside the land he yearned to
enter. Why does the Torah end this way?
Franz Kafka — himself no stranger to unresolved
endings (The Trial” ends with Joseph K. being beaten
“like a dog”) — took an interest in this question. He
writes: The dying vision of it can only be intended to illus-
trate how incomplete a moment is human life, incom-
plete because a life like this could last forever and
still be nothing but a moment. Moses fails to enter
Canaan not because his life is too short but because
it is a human life.

In Kafka’s reading, the Torah’s ending reflects the
larger reality of human life itself, which is “nothing
but a moment,” an exercise in incompleteness. Our
personal narratives don’t fit neatly into a box. They
don’t have ribbons on top and rarely end with group
hugs. Human life ends unrequited, ever yearning,
ever hoping. As Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg writes in
her magisterial biography of Moses: “Veiled and
unveiled, he remains lodged in the Jewish imagina-
tion, where, in his uncompleted humanity, he comes
to represent the yet-unattained but attainable messi-
anic future.”
And that is perhaps why I love abrupt endings
most. They reflect the fabric of life itself. As David
Foster Wallace once observed of Kafka’s narratives,
they emphasize “[t]hat our endless and impossible
journey toward home is in fact our home.” What is
more human than an ending that just recursively
folds into another beginning of longing and hoping?
Moses’ unrealized dream and legacy continues,
and begins again, in the minds and hearts of those
captured by his story.

So save your group hugs for sitcoms. Real life
doesn’t have a neat ending. We continue the journey
where the last generation left off. An ending that
perpetually endures. ■
hate … All our fates are intertwined.”
But Israel’s policies create a dilemma. When many
of our potential allies see Israel, they see a country
that calls itself a democracy but enacts laws enshrin-
ing Jewish dominance over Palestinian citizens of
Israel. And they see a country that has denied funda-
mental human rights to Palestinians in the West Bank
and Gaza for 56 years. So, not surprisingly, they are
moved to speak out about these realities.

Criticism of Israel will inevitably heighten in
response to the policies and actions of this Israeli
government. Some of Israel’s critics may indeed
cross a line by using antisemitic tropes or stereo-
types or denying Jews the same rights afforded to
others, including Palestinians. When they do, they
should not get a free pass. Full stop.

But we must resist the temptation to reflexively
respond with accusations of Jew hatred, even when
the criticism of Israel is off-base or unjustified.

We cannot afford to oversimplify complex issues
by conflating political disagreements about Israel
with antisemitism. If we do, we risk distracting
from addressing the most dangerous instances of
antisemitism and bigotry.

Times like these call on us to shed the weight of
our past and approach these issues with clear minds
and thoughtful consideration. “Sometimes we split
the world into good and bad to guard ourselves
against difficult realities,” my mother said. “If we can
rid ourselves of the bad and make it so the other side
is always guilty, then we feel safe. But by doing so,
we lose the ability to find a solution.” ■
Rabbi David Bashevkin is the director of education
for NCSY, the youth movement of the Orthodox
Union, and an instructor at Yeshiva University. This
op-ed originally appeared on My Jewish Learning.

Jonathan Jacoby directs the Nexus Task Force,
which is affiliated with the Center for the Study of
Hate at Bard College. He is the former executive
director of the New Israel Fund and the former
executive director of the Israel Policy Forum.

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