A Mother’s Love: Shiri Bibas & Mishpatim

After days of collective grieving, we are left with anguish and heartbreaking uncertainty. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were brutally murdered—and Shiri’s fate remains unknown. No one knows where she is.

So many of us feel numb.  We had hoped, against all reason, for a miracle: Shiri and her two redheaded boys stepping into the light. And now I cannot stop thinking about Yarden Bibas. His body recovering from cruel captivity. His heart crushed under a grief no human should bear.

The weight of this sadness rests upon all of us who are part of this extended Jewish family. This same jagged grief tore through us on October 7th, and we have carried it ever since. And once again, we ask: How do we live with this? How are we meant to respond?

These past 500 days have convinced me that our grief must shape us — that we must hold onto the pain fiercely, refusing to let it make us numb. Because imagine — just imagine — a Jewish people without shared sorrow, without shared love. It is unthinkable.

This, too, is Torah. This, too, we received at Sinai.

Yitro described a battered mass of escaped slaves standing together as something new. As God spoke from the mountain, we were transformed from a wandering family into a covenantal nation.

It was overwhelming—lightning, flames, a voice that cracked the sky. Rashi tells us that in that moment, we were “as one person with one heart”—a people who did not yet know how to build, but knew we would build together.

But after the poetry and passion of Sinai, we step into Mishpatim. Gone is the fire. Instead, Moses receives a different kind of revelation: rules, details, case studies—the fine print of civilization.

I always found this transition jarring. How did we go from revelation to legal disputes over oxen? From ecstasy to the minutiae of civil responsibility?

Then I became a mother. And I understood.

I learned that love is not just passion—it is obligation. Not grand gestures, but the repetitive acts that sustain another: feeding, holding. Love is duty. Love is labor.

This is the heart of Mishpatim. It is not only the legal scaffolding for Jewish society. The Torah takes the logic of parental love—unyielding, obligated—and insists that we expand it beyond the walls of our homes, to our entire people.

Mara Benjamin, in The Obligated Self, argues that motherhood teaches us what it means to be obligated, what she calls “the Law of the Baby.” She writes:

“The law could not be fulfilled in abstract, but only in active, embodied, material actions: soothing, feeding, cleaning, comforting, distracting, smiling, and wiping.”

This is why the heartbreak of Shiri’s unknown fate and her children’s murder feels unbearable. She embodied Mishpatim—the kind of love that is not a one-time grand event, but utterly and constantly binding.

We know, deep in our bones, what it means for a mother to care for her child. And so we can imagine—God help us, we can imagine—what Shiri must have done in the depths of Gaza to protect her sons. To comfort them. To make them feel safe, even in hell.

This is what makes all this unbearable. It is not just the monstrosity of her captors—it is the image of a mother holding her innocent children, trying to shield them with her body and a flimsy blanket, trying to love them even there.

This is what makes it cut so sharply.

For over 500 days, we have lived this kind of love. We have worn hostage pins, protested, shared stories, donated, and called our representatives. We have cared for one another. We have acted as if each hostage were our own family.

Through this labor, we have turned strangers into family. We have created love.

Against all odds, we have carried a love that binds and obligates across generations. A love that aches and endures. This is Am Yisrael Chai.

This is why we are grieving now for Ariel, Kfir, and Oded Lifshitz—why we will not stop fighting for Shiri and our remaining hostages. Because Mishpatim has shaped us into a people who refuse to let heartbreak belong only to those who suffer directly.

Yes, this love hurts us. Yes, it makes us vulnerable.

But we must never forget: this love, this so-called weakness—
It is our greatest power.