On the morning of Oct. 8, 2023, I quickly made a Google slide presentation with songs for Israel. I didn’t know what else to do, but I knew that the 400 students at our northern New Jersey synagogue’s religious school were going to show up in an hour and I needed something to create a sense of community before sending them off to class.
We gathered in the sanctuary, and we sang “Am Yisrael Chai,” Rick Recht’s “The Hope” and of course “Hatikva,” Israel’s national anthem. I remember saying to the children that something terrible had happened in Israel, that small children had been taken captive, and that no matter what happened, we have seen this before, we have overcome many tragedies in our long Jewish history, and no matter what, we have to have hope.
In the weeks and months that followed, it became my mission to ignite a sense of connection to Israel in all of my students, from the five-year-olds to the high school seniors and all of their parents. We did this by adding “Hatikva” to our weekly assembly and praying for the hostages. Our prayer for the State of Israel every week has included reading the names of selected hostages. We have said all of the names in rotation over the past 16 months, but we always included the Bibas family — Shiri Bibas and her two children, Kfir and Ariel, ages 9 months and 4 at the time of their abduction. Those little redheaded boys became a symbol of both hope and despair. Even though they weren’t released in the months immediately after the attacks we never gave up hope that they would return home someday.
For some reason, people think rabbis know all the answers, which led to unanswerable questions: “Do you think they’re dead?” “Were they snuck out of Gaza and they’re in Iran?” “Are they going to raise them to be anti-Israel and in 20 years from now they will just come back as terrorists?” I heard it all. And never once did I want to believe that they were really dead. Never once did I want to turn to one of my students or their parents and say, “Actually, I think in the chaos and cruelty of Oct. 7 and after, they lost their lives.” I always just believed they would come home.
Those babies are all our babies. Every mother has held onto her baby as tightly as Shiri was holding on to them in the desperate viral videos that Hamas broadcast on Oct. 7. Few of us have ever had that much fear or been in that much danger, but mothers (and fathers) all know the instinct that we have to protect our children. Not only are those babies our hope, they are the symbol of the desperation that we all have felt in wanting to protect our children from all of the evil that could potentially happen to them.
I’ll see my students again on Sunday morning, and I will have to put the names of all of the returned hostages in the slides that we use for our weekly service, as I have done every week for the past five weeks. We have said the blessing thanking God for the good that is in the world as each hostage has come home, and we have continued to ask God to redeem all of the captives.
This time, we’ll have to read the names of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir and add the traditional blessing said when acknowledging a recent death: Baruch Dayan Haemet, blessed is the true judge. All the joy that we felt and the applause that rang through the room that first week when young women soldiers came home as part of the recent ceasefire deal is going to be eclipsed by the news we long dreaded and hoped would never be delivered. And I will have to explain to my students that even though we had all hoped for their return alive to Israel, God took the Bibas boys and their mother, and that while our hopes for their safety were dashed, to be Jewish is to cling to hope in the face of tragedy.
And that may mean adjusting what we hope for. As I write this, I hope that when the forensics are done, we learn that they really did die on Oct. 7 or soon thereafter, and maybe they did not suffer the way the hostages who are returning have suffered. Maybe the hope is that they had been under God‘s protective shield, and they were spared the torture of the tunnels, of the hunger, of the unknown, of the longing, of the fear.
We can hope that their father Yarden, who was abducted separately and released on Feb. 1, can find some solace in the public’s embrace of his loved ones, and that their memories will be the greatest blessing for him and all of Am Yisrael. Their smiling faces, and all those viral videos, will live on and the torment of our nation will recede as we continue to hope that the rest of the hostages will come home. And we will continue to pray and hope that one day nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither will they learn war anymore.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
