“How did you get two redheads?” is a question I often get asked at the playground as people admire my children’s heads, their hair turning an ethereal orange when it catches the sun. Their hair isn’t that bright rich copper of slain Israeli hostages Ariel and Kfir Bibas — may their sweet memories be for a blessing, we now choke out through tears — but reddish nonetheless. I know that they are asking how my husband and I, with our darker brown mops, got two redheaded babies, to which there is a simple genetic answer (both our mothers have auburn hair), but in my mind the question and the answer is about the mystery and miracle of existence. How did I get so lucky to have two boys, bright eyes, crimson-tinged hair, beautiful boys, sweet boys? What have I done to deserve such a gift?
In the days after October 7, 2023, I, like many of us, was constantly woken from nightmares. I dreamt of being airless in captivity, away from my children locked in dark rooms, moments before death, of claustrophobic tunnels and of approaching gunfire and missiles. And I woke to images of nightmares, too: of helpless women, men and children being dragged away bloodied, of charred bodies and rubbled homes.
Then there was Shiri Bibas’ face, the face of a mother in mortal anguish, holding her little ones tight. Her face looked like mine, her hair not as red as her little ones. As she was dragged from her home, she looked like a lioness, fearfully roaring for her children, two boys wrapped tight around her chest with a blanket. They were calm, maybe in shock, or maybe that instinctual sense of safety a child has when he is tightly cradled against his mother’s chest, the lull of her beating heart against his own. How many nights and days did I spend calming my little one against my own heart, tightly wrapped like baby Kfir?
“I would die for my children,” mothers sometimes say, but all parents know that a greater terror than their own death is the death of one’s children. My heart breaks for the endless moments of Shiri fearing for her two sweet little ones. No matter how long those moments lasted, it was much too long for anyone to deserve.
In the weeks and months and now over a year since they were taken from their home in Nir Oz, a kibbutz that lost a third of its members, including Shiri’s own parents, and is still waiting for so many loved ones to return, we saw tables all around the world set with a high chair for Kfir, a booster seat for Ariel, bottles and so many yellow balloons flown in their honor. Pictures of Ariel with a Batman drawing inspired people to throw their own Batman parties in his honor. Artists paid tributes, poets wrote poems. Every time we saw a redheaded child, we thought of Ariel and Kfir.
And when I looked at my own redheaded boys and thought, “How did I get so lucky?” that question felt like ash in my mouth, bitter and astringent as iodine, so much darker in these over 500 days that have felt like infinities and forevers. What have I done to deserve such a gift, when others have the same gift so cruelly taken away? My little one makes my heart run marathons in my chest when he climbs everything, just like Ariel did for Shiri and his father, Yarden. When they were babies, they were so full of Kfir-like smiles. Our little ones are such miracles. Too many little miracles have been lost since October 7.
In November of 2023, Hamas announced that the Bibas children and Shiri had been killed. Yarden was cruelly given the news in captivity. Yet Israel never confirmed their deaths. For over 500 days they remained between the dead and the living, the cruelest Schrodinger’s box. Many of us had relinquished most of our hope, but we couldn’t let that candle go out, not fully, not for the Bibas family. We barely knew them — they had not been as omnipresent as Rachel Goldberg-Polin and other lioness moms — but they were in us, as we were all part of the same family. Even as Hamas and then Israel confirmed the news that their bodies would be returning to Israel, the Bibas family asked not to mourn them yet, holding onto a wisp of hope. Please don’t call for revenge in our names, they asked, only for the return of the remaining hostages — 16 more from Nir Oz still in Gaza.
And so I followed their lead and held on to hope, too, for the sake of Yarden Bibas, who came back from almost 500 days in captivity with a sweet smile and his humor holding him upright.
This morning the Hostages Square in Tel Aviv is filled with balloons, Batmans, teddy bears and flags. Our social media feeds are colored orange. As I spend these last moments in that terrible uncertainty that the Bibas family has been in for all this time — Yarden’s sister, Ofri, who dreamed of seeing her kids hug their cousins again; Shiri’s sister, who has already grieved her own loving parents, who made their home a place for their grandchildren to orbit around only for it to burn to the ground — my life as a parent goes on. My little boy insists on drawing a bat, unwittingly honoring Ariel. When he sees a picture of baby Kfir on my phone, he tells me, “I like that baby.” I kiss his forehead as my heart sinks to bottomless depths.
One of the things I love most about Judaism is the way it addresses grief, how it lays down a blueprint meant to embrace the mourner, to ground that first full year after loss with rituals — the shiva, the shloshim, the yahrzeit. Yet even those rituals don’t offer enough comfort for the death of a child.
May their memories be for a revolution is what I have taken to writing in eulogies for hostages I didn’t know before but who are now forever a part of us all. Sagacious Alex Dancyg. Fierce Vivian Silver. Miraculous, brilliant young Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Writing it now feels almost senseless. And yet.
Ariel and Kfir deserved, like all our little miracles, a world of peace, a world where war doesn’t steal anyone from their mothers, or steal them with their mothers. Hope was extinguished today for the Bibas family, who dreamed of embracing Shiri and her sweet boys once again. I’m so sorry we couldn’t do better by them. I hope we can still do better by the remaining hostages. May their memories be for a revolution, for the world that all our little miracles deserve.
