For Jews, the world has stilled. In Israel the streets are lined with people holding flags and orange balloons, holding each other. In the diaspora we hold our breath, staring at our screens, frozen.
The endless conversations I have with other Jewish mothers, the connection and community that keeps us buzzing behind the scenes of raising children and running our careers and caring for our families — today it’s silenced. WhatsApp, text threads, DMs: empty.
Baruch dayan emet. May their memories be a revolution. May you have a long life. There is nothing else left to say.
Ariel and Kfir Bibas are gone. Oded Lifshitz is gone. On Friday, Israel announced that Shiri Bibas was missing, her body having not returned from Gaza. A mother, with eyes like our own. A baby. A preschooler. A great-grandfather who spent his life fighting for peace. Each a whole world, extinguished or lost. On Thursday, the bodies of the boys and of Lifshitz were handed over by their Hamas killers, in a violent mockery of our grief. Their caskets were paraded like trophies, presented in front of a bloodied banner. And Shiri has yet to be found.
And the world continues, silent and largely uncaring.
Recently, my 6th grade son had a unit on Israel. He was proud to be something of a subject matter expert — the only Jew in his class. When they had their final test, he came home in tears. He’d had one question marked wrong, and he didn’t understand why. The question was: “What is the word for Jews living outside the Jewish homeland?” His teacher wanted him to pick “diaspora,” but he chose “exile.” “I thought about it a lot,” he said. “Exile felt correct.”
And today, I can see he was right. For those of us in the diaspora, it’s never felt more like galut, like exile. Our hearts are in Jerusalem, but our bodies are here.
After Oct. 7 there were mornings where I’d hear new details — I’d read about the way children were slaughtered in front of their parents, parents massacred in front of their children. I’d see images of tiny Jewish bodies incinerated. And I’d stand up from the breakfast table, smile tightly at my children, shut the door to the bathroom, and fall to the floor, dry heaving. The pain was more than my body could hold; it was poison that it wanted to purge.
But then, like every other Jewish mother, I would stand up, wash my face, and return to my kids. We had children to raise. We had babies trapped in Gaza to fight for. We had to defer our sorrow.
But in the cold light of this morning, none of our children are left in torture tunnels. The last of our babies have been returned momentarily to the light, till they are given back to the earth. And somehow we have to move forward.
For weeks Jewish mothers have asked each other, “If the Bibas children have been killed, how do we go on?” And today the answer is clear to me: We don’t. We stop.
The bodies of Ariel, Kfir and Oded have been returned to us. And there is nothing we can do but feel the agony as it rips through our bodies. Tomorrow, maybe, we can act. But today we hold still.
Jewish mothers tried to keep the Bibas family alive with the strength of our communal love and longing. We wore orange to try to get the world remember the flame-haired boys, we shared pictures of the family in Batman pajamas and the horrific video of their capture. We made sure they were not forgotten, and we tried to will them safely home.
It’s the same thing I do when I fly: I try to keep the plane aloft with the power of my mind. But a greater power is guiding the plane — the forces of aeronautics. And today we realize the same jagged truth. For all of our collective hope, we never had the power to keep Ariel and Kfir alive. What we had was love, prayer and collective magical thinking. We had already lost them, but in our hearts and minds they were still alive.
That is the power of our tribe, unbroken for thousands of years. We have collective memories, joys and sorrows. And today, two red-headed boys become part of our history, a story we will never stop telling.
Today, a nation mourns, in Israel and in exile. Jewish mothers everywhere know that the nightmare has come round again, our deepest fears slashed across the news. But still, somehow, we choose life. We turn our eyes back towards our children, we wipe our faces, and we get up off the floor.
We say “Am Yisrael Chai” like a triumphant mantra. But the reality of how the nation of Israel lives is mundane. Pouring cheerios. Teaching the Shema. Singing “Hatikvah.” Driving to Hebrew school. Comforting our children in the dark. And then waking up with them as dawn breaks, each and every morning.
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