My baby is 9 months old, the same age as Kfir Bibas was when he was taken by Hamas. While anyone with the merest glimmer of a moral conscience is in pain over the fate of Ariel and Kfir and their mother, Shiri, the pain feels more like the profoundest agony for Jewish mothers. We are her, and she is us.
But for Jewish mothers with a 9-month-old baby, like me, the agony is tinged with a bit more: the stark, real-time recognition of what Shiri must have felt in those moments as her nightmare was just starting to take shape. The sheer terror of not knowing how to keep our young children safe. The practical considerations of how we would care for a baby who is grappling with starting solids and still relies largely on formula for sustenance, who needs the routine of bath and bedtime to sleep comfortably. The mental checklist of everything we need when we leave our home for short trips or errands: Diapers. Wipes. Favored blankies. The realization of how easily it could have been us with our babies being ushered away by Hamas “operatives” if not for different geographical choices made by our ancestors fleeing Nazi Germany. And amid the rage and sadness, we feel afraid.
For along with the onset and blessings of motherhood comes the most profound fear: that we could one day fail to protect our children from certain harm. As a brand-new mother 15 years ago, I feared my infant son would stop breathing in his crib, and so I kept exhausted but resolute watch each night to ensure his chest rose and fell at regular intervals. With my second baby a few years later, I feared for the times I’d live apart from her and the nights I would not be there to tuck her in, knowing my marriage was on the cusp of ending. I never thought to fear being torn from my home, baby in arms, condemned to an unthinkable fate as the Western world not only ignored our plight but exalted our captors.
It is into this irrevocably broken world that I have brought a new baby, conceived just before October 7 and now 9 months old. I had thought I’d mother her with the hard-won confidence that comes from age and experience—if I have a few more wrinkles and gray hairs, at least I also have the wisdom earned through years of navigating the highs and lows of parenthood. Yet here I am, knocked off my axis by tragically confounding global events an ocean away and yet deeply embedded in my own heart and home.
It’s unavoidable for moms like me not to see ourselves in Shiri and our babies in Kfir. I, along with so many others, have parsed the look of sheer terror on her face when she was first taken, looking for clues of…what, exactly, I don’t know. Like we’re grasping desperately for some kind of explanation to an unfathomable truth, which is that there are people in the world today who hate us so much that they could murder a mother in the prime of her life and two young children on the cusp of so many firsts: first words, first steps, first day of school, first everything.
But there are no answers to irresolvable questions. Only the starkest realization that true horror and hatred that motivates one to murder innocents indiscriminately is not confined to the history books, but is here right now in the present.
Like most anxiety-prone Jews, I grew up nursing an obsession with the Holocaust, sparked by a rerun of the Holocaust miniseries “Shoah,” which I watched secretly from beneath my parents’ bed, frozen in shock, while they thought I was asleep in my room.
I became further obsessed with the moral dilemmas in which Jews found themselves and placed myself directly in them. Would I kill someone else to save myself? My sibling? A parent? Would I rather starve or steal bread from my neighbor? And so on. These were the brutal calculations of survival people were forced to make, and their raw, unforgiving complexities fascinated me.
It feels like now we are also struggling with profound moral questions as we contemplate what’s next in the wake of this latest agonizing loss. It wasn’t that long ago that I used to tense slightly when people like my right-wing cousins or that one Kahane-obsessed fringe Jewish journalist I’m still Facebook friends with would refer to Hamas as Amalek. How primitive, I’d sniff. People with a more refined worldview could at least attempt to consider the nuances of geopolitics and the messiness of the Middle East, and to resist resorting to such extreme and reductive language.
But I’m not the only modern mother with semi-reformed liberal tendencies who keeps rewatching the tape of Shiri and her babies in their moment of capture, and feels implicitly she was taken by the descendants of the same evil that coursed through the veins of Amalek and of the Romans and of Stalinists and of Adolf Hitler and his foot soldiers. We no longer wish to attempt to intellectualize Palestinian rage for the sake of appeasing liberal colleagues or friends. We are not talking about responding to evil with doing more mitzvahs and spreading more love as a means to repair a broken world.
We hate, and we don’t want to sanitize it. We are angry, and we don’t want to calm down. We are in deep mourning, and if we find comfort in embracing our own babies close to our chests, we also feel a deep undercurrent of fear, and a somber awareness of how fragile their safety is in a world where people who hate us this much are given a cloak of righteousness by the greater world.
To call Hamas Amalek is no longer hyperbole or the rhetoric of an extremist, but a vicious truth we are forced to confront. For anyone, but especially those who just brought babies into the world, this truth is profoundly sobering.
Years ago I read “Sophie’s Choice,” like any good Holocaust fanatic does at some point, I wondered who my mother would have chosen. When I became a mother, I knew with painful clarity that the choice was impossible. Yet, as mothers, we are sometimes called to do impossible things.
Like Shiri, who despite her terror in the clutches of pure evil, held her babies with their perfect little red heads close to her as she was dragged away from their home into the deepest darkest depths of hell. The only thing I know with certainty is that she held onto them for as long as she could.
Tova Cohen is a fundraising communications professional and college essay coach. She lives in Bergen County with her family.
