Explaining Global Atrocity to a Toddler

“Mama, stop thinking.”

My son told me this at breakfast one morning this week. It was 7 AM and I had my head in my hands.

“I need more milk in the yellow cup,” he added. “With a lid that doesn’t taste like a lid.”

I obliged.

“Why were you sad?” he asked later that day on the way home from the park. Nothing gets by a four-year-old’s mother-attuned weather vane. He feels the tiniest atmospheric disturbance. Here is the conversation we had, annotated with what I did not say.

“I’m sad about something very far away where people got hurt and now more people are getting hurt. But we are safe and my job is to keep you safe.”

“When I close my eyes I see the hostages - the babies alone and confused. I hear their mothers’ screams. I hear your cousin crying on the phone listing names. I hear the kids in Gaza. Parents carrying tiny, makeshift bodybags through the rubble. I see the fear in their faces on the news. Children exactly like you are dying and Jews are holding two griefs while much of the world holds one. I see ‘Cleanse the world of Jews’ signs at marches I fundamentally agree with. The marches are one mile away from your crib.”

“Why did they get hurt?”

“Because they lived in a place called Israel where other people want to live. And there has a been a very long fight about Israel. And sometimes the fight turns violent, because nobody in charge there can use their words.”

“Violent terrorist extremism erupts as a reaction to oppression, indoctrination, and desperation. Your great-grandmother would have gone to Israel if she were turned away from Ellis Island. It’s a fucking fluke that you weren’t born there. It’s a fluke you weren’t taken from your bed for being born there. They got hurt because they were unlucky Jews in an unbroken chain of centuries of unlucky Jews. They got hurt even though they were protesting Netanyahu, a horrifying right-wing extremist whose draconian policies ignited a powder keg. And now he is annihilating a population in our name.”

“Will I get hurt?”

“No. You will not get hurt.”

“I am paralyzed with horror that some of my dear friends liked a post that said ‘The resistance will not be quiet’ on October 8th. That they are marching with student groups that put out statements on October 9th explicitly saying the settlers deserved it and the slaughter was not only justified but morally righteous. A rabbi was stabbed in Michigan. They are writing ‘kill the Jews’ on subway walls. A woman was punched on 34th street for looking Jewish. Our friends in Berlin had a molotov cocktail thrown into a synagogue. The Chabad kids who play in the yard outside the school are playing indoors now while a volunteer stands guard. You will not get hurt as long as I live because you are blonde and I keep your face and identity a secret. I will never let you wear a yarmulke outside the synagogue. I took the mezuzah off our door. We hang Christmas lights in the window facing the street and light the menorah in the kitchen. You will fight for a world where Muslim kids don’t get hurt. Where Muslim kids don’t walk in fear. Where they make it home alive. You will not get hurt, and you will not hurt. You are my hope for a healing world. You are the reason I sleep after I can’t sleep. When you drink your milk from your yellow cup, you are the luckiest boy on earth. May the children in Israel and Gaza be as lucky as you.”