Our Children's Bodies

For Shiri

There are not many Jewish children in the world.

There were more before the holocaust, when 1,500,000 were killed simply for being Jewish children. We added two to the count yesterday.

Kfir and Ariel Bibas were tiny boys who loved Bat Man and their mother, Shiri. The boys are smiling in the photographs on posters that were torn down from lamp posts days after they were stolen from their home in kibbutz Nir Oz, Shiri begging on camera to take her with them, pleading with terrorists to leave them alone as she clutched them both to her chest, bargaining, frightened with a look more animal than human but more human than I have ever looked.

In the photos, Kfir smiles wide and toothless and Ariel grins lopsided with mischief. Ariel’s hair was long — he was a hippie kibutznik of hippie parents. They are so, so pale, like my own, with orange hair, like my youngest.

Kfir and Ariel Bibas are my children. This is a feeling held by every Jewish mother I know, on every end of every political spectrum. Our texts are a fucking mess of broken hearts and orange hearts and closeups of our babies’ faces.

There is implicit shame of crying for babies who look like our own. It is not because they look like our own. It is because they are our family. I have said it before, but as white as loud and crotchety and culturally saturated as we are, there are not many Jews alive on this earth. We are 0.2% of the global population. Zero point two.

And it needs to be said because after posting their images online yesterday I was flooded by grief repudiation, I mourn the babies of this war. I have mourned them. I have screamed at the images of Rafah, babies burned, babies starved in incubators. I have seen my precocious five-year-old in the faces of children holding press conferences begging for aid. I have written and used my platform to advocate for diplomatic solutions to this ceaseless and self-defeating bloodshed and retribution in the names of our own Jewish babies.

And yet and yet and yet and yet. The “and” is hauntingly lonely.

I see the Bibas boys and I break. It comes from birthing my own children and holding them on the hospital bed and feeling connected to a matrilineal blood tribe that spans thousands of years back to the first survivors of certain slaughter.

A Jewish baby’s life is beating the odds of centuries. An eternal flame in the tuft of red hair. The snuffing out of that light, the tiny coffins were paraded as trophies, the horror of the ghoulish prank in the mother’s coffin, was darkness as haunting and lonely and suffocating and infinite as the far reaches of universe. The sacrilegious taunt desecrating another woman’s corpse.

There are days I am thankful to live in New York City, the public weeping capital of the world. Yesterday was one of them.

After dropping my child off at kindergarten, I walked to my parents’ apartment where my mother was on her laptop looking up Ikea daybeds where my sons could sleep if they ever wanted to stay at grandma and grandpa’s. “Looks good,” I said (How lucky, how lucky, how mundane, how joyous, how fortunate, how incredible.) “I like it. We can switch out the knobs.” (Shiri, Shiri, Shiri.)

Halfway through a discussion about the relative dangers of trundle beds that pop up, versus trundle beds that stay on the floor, we were crying.

“I know,” my mom said. “At least she was with them.”

There was no context. There was no pretext. It was a shared Jewish thought felt coursing through the vessels around every Jewish body, holding onto whatever creates or created the tiny bodies of Jewish babies.

It was a harrowing Mother’s Day for so many of yesterday.

To wish the dead body was Shiri and to howl when it was not, to wish her dead only so she doesn’t have to bear the truth of what the baby autopsies detailed, to wince at the thought of Yarden having to exist in a world without the children, almost certainly without Shiri, to know his greatest hope is that she went quickly, and she was holding them, and they didn’t suffer although we know we know we know they did.

The screams of her holding the babies as they took them all away. The eyes as she watched the life she had given them, the life her ancestors had given them all, upended in a tale as old as Talmud.

All I can offer her, and her memory, and her legacy, and her love and her babies and her grasp around them so, so tight, is that she is not alone. I am with her. I am weeping for her children. I am holding my own as she held hers knowing that it could all be taken away.

May Kfir and Ariel’s light be eternal. May their memories be in the beating of our hearts, and our children’s hearts.

May you, reading this, know you are not alone.