I Would Tear The World Apart To Bring You Home: A Mother’s Day Message

Every so often when I’m lying in bed with my precocious five-year-old daughter – the one who listens too closely when I talk to others about Israel, hostages and Hamas – she’ll turn to me and ask, stone faced: “Mommy what would you do if Hamas took me?”

I give her the same answer every time: “I would tear the world apart to get you back. I would never stop. I would bring you home even if it was the last thing I ever did in this world.”

She then closes her eyes and drifts off to sleep almost instantly, as if the certainty in my voice were a blanket tucking in every trace of fear.

I’ve been thinking about those conversations as we reach the second American Mother’s Day since October 7th, 2023. There are still so many Israeli mothers who haven’t gotten their children back. They would tear the world apart if they could. But instead they are still waiting in what must be an excruciating limbo, hoping the world doesn’t forget entirely that their babies are being held by real life monsters.

Motherhood makes you superhuman. It makes you powerful. It makes you brave enough to walk through fire or take a bullet to the chest. It makes you willing to sacrifice yourself or endure anything and everything for this other human that you brought into this world. It’s hard wired the moment that baby is placed in your arms for the first time. But this war has done something unimaginable to hostage mothers. It has paralyzed this most primal instinct.

For almost 600 days, these hostage mothers have been shackled, forced to watch from a distance and told to stand down. The world says, ‘let the diplomats and geopolitics dictate life or death for your child.’ The ones who would be doing anything and everything to save their children are told to just wait.

Some hostage mothers have learned that their children might be alive from hostages that have returned. Others have had little to no signs of life. Of course, no one but the monsters that hold them know for sure the fate of these children. I can think of no agony more torturous.

Some hostage mothers will spend this Mother’s Day cradling their children again after months in Hamas captivity – mothers like Shelly Shem Tov, Meirav Leshem Gonen and Mandy Damari. Others will spend their first Mother’s Day facing a new reality they prayed they’d never have to endure. American-Israeli Rachel Goldberg Polin is one of them.

For 331 days, Rachel did what mothers are programmed to do. She fought like hell to bring her son Hersh home. She became a global voice refusing to let the world forget his name. She was the physical embodiment of unshakable maternal love. In August, it was confirmed Hersh had been murdered in captivity. This Mother’s Day, Rachel will sit at her table with one seat forever empty. And still she fights. For the children still held hostage. For the mothers still waiting. For the promise that no one will be forgotten. Rachel has become more than an advocate. She is a moral North Star. Grief in one hand. Resolve in the other.

Maybe that’s the unifying bond of motherhood: we don’t quit. We carry together what’s too heavy to do alone. We rise not just for our own children but for each other’s too.

This Mother’s Day, let’s all try to be like Rachel. Unwrap the handmade cards from our children and get breakfast in bed, but then also link arms with the mothers who’ve suffered for far too long. Remind anyone who will listen that there are children that must return home. Lift hostage mothers’ hopes when the agony becomes too heavy for them to bear. Every one of us has a role to play because these mothers shouldn’t have to do this alone.

Maybe, just maybe, that’s how we tear the world apart – together – until we bring all of them home.