Paradise, Lost

I will confess that I couldn’t watch the Bibas eulogies today. I saw the pictures, of course, of hundreds of thousands lining the streets of Israel, paying their last respects to the three people who became such a symbol of the past 16 months. But unlike Hersh’s funeral, I couldn’t watch.  I had to teach all day; I couldn’t sob through class. I checked once between classes and I saw a picture of Yarden Bibas kissing the coffin holding his wife and both of their children, together, in death as in life. It was a mistake; it was hard to keep it together thereafter. This was not helped by the subject that I teach — I teach the Holocaust to teenagers, and one of the leitmotifs of our class is trying to get them to understand the paradigm shift of being a parent. Whether or not you had kids at the outbreak of the war dictated everything — how you were capable of responding, your capacity to resist, your likely fate in the war. Time and again, I ask them why people their age — 17, 18 — and people my age — mid 30s — would have acted so differently at every juncture. The answer is almost always that I have children and they don’t. 

When you read primary sources from Oneg Shabbos or other archival material produced during the Holocaust, the fixation on the fate of the children was paramount in every context. The death of some 1.5 million Jewish children represented a profound loss of hope during the war, the end of the future that subsequent generations represent. In diaries from the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the days that people commented upon the most was the day that Jasnusz Korczak’s orphans were taken to the Umschlagplatz, singing – they all knew their fate, and what it represented for the Jewish people. One of the most hated men in the entire war, Chaim Rumkowski, is so despised because of his decision to fill the Nazi quotas with children in an effort to keep the Lodz ghetto a productive labour force. That his attempt almost worked — the ghetto was not liquidated until summer 1944, some two years after the majority of Polish ghettos — is irrelevant. His decision to send children to their deaths, without their parents to hold them, has consigned him to Dante’s lowest rings of Hell.

This traumatic history is in many ways why I think the death of the Bibas children hurts so much. It is not as if they were the only children impacted on October 7th, and far from the only children impacted in this war at large. I will always remember the video of the Palestinian father whose babies died in an air strike while he was out registering their births. But there was something haunting about these ones: I don’t know the Bibas family, and yet, I hoped and prayed and grieved and sobbed like they were loved ones.  Their deaths would have been traumatic enough on their own; but in the end, it hurts so much because those deaths represented the end of something far greater. 

The images of the Bibases on October 7th became as iconic as the falling man or ash lady of 9/11 for many of us. A woman and two children, dragged from their bedroom by civilians — not even by Hamas — into Gaza, never to be seen again. Madonna and her babies, Shiri’s face of terror, at once more animalistic and human than any other. Had they died on the 7th, while heartbreaking, it may have been easier; their deaths are so devastating because the Bibas family — for so long — represented the most dangerous of things: hope. 

We all wanted Kfir and Ariel back; we looked at their little ginger heads and their pacifiers, their wide eyes only reassured by the presence of their mother, the perceived safety of her arms. Kfir, who was the same age as my daughter; Ariel, who was the same age as my son. I could see the horror and fear writ large on Shiri’s face, the same face I imagined made by hundreds of thousands of Jewish women as their children over the centuries as their fates were put in the hands of others. 

We hoped against hope for their return. Every day during the hostage release in November 2023, I prayed for their arrival. They never came. Knowing that they were all dead by then is both a heartbreak and a relief. But still, we continued to hold on to the most Jewish and illusory of values: hope. Even when all seemed lost, so many of us believed that if only — if only! — they could be returned to us, some part of the evil of that day could have been undone. Some sense of innocence, lost by all of us, could be restored. Some sense of justice, of victory and fairness, emotions lost in an ocean of pain experienced by both Israelis and Palestinians in the last 16 months, could return to the world. 

When they were buried today, that hope was buried with them. 

We may survive this, but not unaltered. 

We have not only lost thousands of people, we have lost a fundamental belief of our post-Holocaust world: that our children, asleep in their beds, are safe. That the love of their parents could protect them. That the security of the state could protect them. That they could no longer be stolen and murdered with impunity. That we had overcome the time of Jewish children being murdered by gleeful civilians while parents watched helplessly. 

The death of the family and the funerals today are so painful because they compound the shock and trauma of that day in October, both so long and so short ago. The teaching of Jewish history in the 21st century has always been one of paradigms: our safety was so tenuous, but now it is secure. How cheap Jewish blood was, how costly it is now. The trauma of our past was seen entirely through the safety of the present. But since that fateful day, those paradigms and illusions shattered, as our tenuous position at home and abroad became immediately apparent. Our vacation from history is over. Our belief that we would not have generational trauma to inherit or pass on, destroyed. Our fundamental belief that our houses and our safe lives offered enough protection for the ones that we love was proved to be only as strong as a safe room door. 

And the image of Shiri, Kfir and Ariel being buried in one coffin is simultaneously heartbreaking and beautiful. In death, as in life. Mother and children, together, as they were that morning, as they were in Gaza, as they were for over a year as we prayed for their safety, not knowing that there was nothing left to pray for.

Together and resting in the land that they loved so much, the dream of a land, the land that they died for. Paradise, lost.

Baruch Dayan ha’Emet.