Some sentences look simple but smuggle in whole philosophies of life. Take what linguists call a counterfactual conditional: a sentence that talks about something that did not happen, in the form “If X had happened, Y would have followed.” Think of “If I had taken that job, I would be living in Paris now.” The premise is understood to be false, but the grammar lets us linger over an unreal past. Many languages share a version of this grammatical form, but cultures recruit it for strikingly different purposes. The same syntactic pattern can be made to do very different work depending on who is speaking. What shifts is not the grammar but the worldview behind it.

In the contemporary West, the counterfactual has become a primary vehicle for regret and self‑reproach. In colloquial American English, there is even a three‑word museum of missed chances: “shoulda-woulda-coulda.” The point is not to test a theory; it is to nurse a wound, to linger over the glow of an unchosen path. Psychologists even use the phrase as shorthand for this kind of counterfactual thinking, which often drifts towards disappointment and regret.

There is an entire film genre devoted to the idea that one tiny change could have rewritten a life: Sliding Doors, built on catching vs missing a single Tube train, is practically the archetype of the form. The same fantasy powers darker stories like The Butterfly Effect and a long line of “what if” romances and time‑loop narratives. Popular music hums with the same grammar of hindsight: titles like “I Should Have Known Better,” “Should’ve Known Better,” or “Had I Known You Better Then” encode the belief that a better, truer self could and should have chosen differently.

Underneath, the Western counterfactual seems closely tied to a Protestant‑coloured ideal of individual agency: I could have chosen otherwise, therefore I should have, and I am morally answerable to the brighter life I failed to unlock. The imagined alternative self becomes a moral project, and the “If only…” carries a faint accusation against the person we are now. The trouble is that Western counterfactuals often trap the speaker in a loop of self‑recrimination, replaying an unreal past until it begins to feel more authoritative than the real one.

Jewish tradition, by contrast, tends to recruit the same grammatical form for analysis rather than lamentation. One famous example comes from Bava Kamma, where the rabbis debate what compensation would apply if an ox gored a cow in a courtyard that belonged to neither party — a situation that almost certainly never occurred. In Sanhedrin, they even ask what would happen if a witness testified to something impossible — the sun rising in the west, for example — not because they expect such a case, but because the impossible is the cleanest way to test the limits of testimony. Open a page of Talmud and one finds case after case that never happened and never will: “If this injury had occurred in the Temple courtyard, would the same compensation apply?” or “If the verse had been written differently, what law would we derive from it?” The ilu nemar (“if it had been written”) style of argument treats unreal situations as a laboratory for testing principles. The power of the counterfactual lies precisely in the falsity of its premise: because it did not occur, it can be handled, rotated, and probed without anyone’s life depending on it.

It is tempting to hear in this a diasporic re‑routing of agency. Jewish tradition, shaped by long periods with very little real‑world control, learnt to relocate agency into interpretation and law. For long stretches of Jewish history, the big facts — edicts, expulsions, pogroms — lay far beyond individual or communal choice. One cannot rewrite the decree, but one can re‑imagine cases and consequences endlessly. In that setting, the sentence “If X had happened, Y would have followed” is not a wound to be caressed; it is a tool for sharpening thought and responsibility. The same “if… then…” that, in a Western love song, carries a sigh, in a sugya carries a footnote. The counterfactual shifts from history to hermeneutics.

Modern Israeli Hebrew adds a third twist. Israelis grew up in a different furnace: wars, state‑building, chronic uncertainty. Here the sense of agency is intense but tightly constrained; one acts hard within narrow margins. That may explain the almost fatalistic impatience with “what if”: once the event has passed, energy must flow to the next decision, not to the ghost of the last one. In everyday speech, counterfactuals are often greeted with a brisk shrug: lo kara, az lo kara; “it didn’t happen, so it didn’t happen.” It gestures refuse the premise before it can ripen into melodrama. It says: your imagined past is structurally absurd; I decline to enter its emotional economy.

Yet in political and military discourse, counterfactuals return in a different guise. After a military operation, air‑raid, or diplomatic gamble, panels ask: “If we had acted twenty‑four hours earlier, would escalation have been avoided?” Here the “what if” is not a sentimental indulgence but an instrument of strategic learning. The value of the hypothetical lies entirely in how it changes the next decision, not in how vividly it ornaments the last one.

Umberto Eco once gave this whole territory a precise, mischievous formulation. In Foucault’s Pendulum, a character muses:

I could easily be somewhere else now if I hadn’t been in Belbo’s office that day. I could be – who knows? – selling sesame seeds in Samarkand, or editing series of books in Braille, or heading the First National Bank of Franz Josef Land. Counterfactual conditionals are always true, because the premise is false. But I was there that day, so now I am where I am.

I could easily be somewhere else now if I hadn’t been in Belbo’s office that day. I could be – who knows? – selling sesame seeds in Samarkand, or editing series of books in Braille, or heading the First National Bank of Franz Josef Land. Counterfactual conditionals are always true, because the premise is false. But I was there that day, so now I am where I am.

The central sentence is a straight piece of logic. In formal terms, a conditional of the type “If P, then Q” is automatically classified as true whenever P is false, no matter what Q says. “If I had been born on Mars, I would speak Martian”: since I was not born on Mars, the statement is, in that technical sense, trivially “true,” and utterly irrelevant to my actual biography.

Eco’s punchline is that our most charged sentences — “If I had gone,” “If I had known,” “If I had loved you differently” — live inside this logical vacuum. They are always true on paper, and completely powerless to alter the one brute fact: “I was there that day, so now I am where I am.”

Beneath these examples lies a simple triad: the same grammatical form performs three entirely different cultural functions. In the contemporary West, the counterfactual is an emotional grammar; a way of narrating regret and imagining a better self. In the Talmudic tradition, it becomes an analytical grammar; a device for testing principles and mapping conceptual space. In modern Israeli usage, it is a pragmatic grammar; either a tool for operational learning or something briskly waved away as irrelevant. One structure, three psychologies, each with its own emotional ethic. The grammar is the same: a neat “if… then…” wrapped around an unreal past, but the psychology is not. Beneath every “If I had…,” someone specific is speaking: a mourner, a jurist, a strategist, a stand‑up comic. The counterfactual is universal; the uses to which it is put are anything but.

Perhaps it’s not the counterfactual itself that reveals a culture, but the stance it takes towards the impossible past. Westerners narrate it, Jews analyse it, Israelis wave it away — each one performing, in miniature, its history. Perhaps the real question is not what we would have done differently, but what we do with the unreal sentence once it appears. Do we inhabit it, dissect it, dismiss it, or turn it into law? The grammar does not decide. We do.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)