Never been a problem for a four-letter word to fly out of my mouth. When the adrenaline runs high, or frustration crests, or despair or exuberance bubble over, a four-letter word packaging the emotion of the moment often escapes my lips, its spontaneity inevitably mollifying whatever precipitated the eruption.
English is not my mother tongue, so for me any expletives of the four-letter variety lack the significance attributed by others; they are merely acquired reflexive reactions without censorial associations.
Intriguingly, over recent years, I’ve become obsessed with one particular four-letter word. It peppers my speech and writing, embodies volumes within its symmetrical brevity, and remains elusively undefinable – which chafes strongly against my need for precision and literal accuracy.
“Good,” is the four-letter word on increasingly high rotation in my vocabulary.
It might be characterized as a kind of vague and lazy word, like “nice.” What do such words mean exactly, when they can be shorthand for a multitude of meanings, or barely any meaning at all? Like asking your kid how school was, and getting the expected monosyllabic response: “Good,” which tells you nothing beyond that it wasn’t bad, where “bad” is equally non-specific.
Which reminds me how perplexed I used to be when my friend, who was always just that much ahead of me in increasing religious observance, would answer my “How are you” question with “Baruch Hashem (Thank God),” frustratingly providing absolutely no detail, color, or insight about what was going on in her life. Until gradually I began to comprehend that in an important way, her response conveyed all that needed to be said (and as a separate realization, I understood that asking how a person is, is often not a considered or even welcome probing into their welfare).
Good is such a hazy, sweeping word. Why would you use it, for example, to describe a child when you might mean a well-mannered one; or to qualify an act when you mean a generous one; or to express approval when permissible would be more pointed? It simply avoids having to think deeper to find the best descriptor – be it worthy, wise, sensible, skillful…
After all, the Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 600,000 word forms – many times greater than in the Hebrew language – which enable virtually limitless richness, subtlety, and nuance in expression. It’s a joy to find the right English word that precisely imparts what is sought to be communicated.
So what is the place of “good” in all this?
My fascination with and attachment to the word probably started before my husband, Joe, was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2019, but that is the time to which I more easily trace an increasing preoccupation with this misleadingly simple adjective.
The roller-coaster of serious illness reveals many new truths, and reminds us of some forgotten ones. For example, that everything is relative – as the shock of diagnosis makes way for the hope of “just having that cancer” and that the lethal cells have not metastasized.
I learned, too, that it’s often hard to know what to wish for, as what seemed desirable one day was inferior the next, and what appeared to be a backward step turned out later to be exactly right. Good took on a whole new meaning, as when the finding on a scan of a brain tumor was followed by “good news”: it’s single, discrete, operable.
As the cancer eventually advanced, instead of prayers for refuah shlemah (full healing), I asked God for His loving kindness. And as the illness confused and confounded, I ceased knowing what specifically to plead for and adopted the broad brushstroke of prayers “for good,” finding comfort in leaving it to Him to know what good might be.
I am awed by many of the current generation of young adults’ ready embrace and appreciation of good. In the ’70s, when at age 21 in my psychology honors year at Melbourne University I had difficulty finding a research study topic, I gave short shrift to the lecturer’s suggestion of working on available data connected to Albert Schweitzer’s philosophy of reverence for life, for which he had been awarded the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize.
I did not then even consider the place of concepts and values such as good in Schweitzer’s humanitarian and moral framework, and in the end abandoned the honors year, which couldn’t compete with my focus on recently found love and wedding plans.
The quiet power of doing good
In stark contrast, especially in the wake of Oct. 7, I’ve been struck by the deep thinking and commitment to a purposeful life of an increasingly visible number of our IDF soldiers and reservists. In the months after that black day, memorial stickers started appearing on bus shelters, walls, cars, and any and every surface, with photos of soldiers smiling before they had given their lives for the sake of our people and land, accompanied by a value-based message that soldier had espoused or according to his family represented.
There were many key words of action and aspiration, such as optimism, courage, helping others. But it was the prevalence of good (or the Hebrew equivalent, tov) that my eye settled on, both in media stories about fallen soldiers and in those stickers that have since been digitally collected.
Here is a selection: “Always seek only the good” (St.-Sgt. Regev Amar, who fell on Oct. 7); “…be good people in your own way” (St.-Sgt. Shachar Fridman, who fell November 19, 2023); “Continue to add light and goodness” (St.-Sgt. Zamir Burke, who fell November 29, 2024); “Do good, receive good” (Sgt. Daniel Gersho, who fell June 6, 2024).
We can identify with such and many other examples of the intrinsic value of goodness folded into those young lives. Beyond the fundamental principles of a moral life, which apply in all places and at all times – such as do not murder, do not steal – while good may defy ready definition, it is a pillar of an instinctive, intuitive, universal language that speaks to us all in ordinary everyday moments, which surely must be the point.
Good builds on and echoes all we have learned and experienced in life to guide our thoughts and actions according to inherent signposts, which we are sometimes able to articulate and at other times we simply sense and “know.”
Mind and perception self-focus remarkably, so that any word that happens to be on frequent replay in our thinking starts appearing – or rather, being noticed – all around us. That is the case with good, which endlessly jumps at me from printed pages, digital screens, conversations.
It did so in the surge of volunteerism post-Oct. 7, when so many worked selflessly toward a larger purpose to do good together, in support of thousands of called-up reservists and their families.
It does so on dozens of pages of the siddur, beseeching the establishment of goodness and blessing; it does so in the plea at Rosh Hashanah that we be inscribed for a good life.
It does so in the classic song by Naomi Shemer, which I was humming long before aliyah: “Anashim Tovim” (Good People), expressing the optimism of finding kind strangers along life’s journey.
And that’s who many of us hope to meet as we walk along the way, and who we aspire to be on our chosen path – the person who reaches out and cares, who makes a positive difference to another in small and bigger ways, who makes good be part of his life. Who seeks to think and act and live it.
The writer was a lawyer in Melbourne, Australia, before making aliyah with her husband, Joe, in 2015 to join their children. She is blessed to call Jerusalem home, and writes and reads for purpose, pleasure, and emotional sustenance.