In Search of a Happy Ending, Settling for Revenge

For the past 502 days, I hung onto every bit of news about our Israeli brothers and sisters held hostage in Gaza. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and check Twitter for a crumb of news. I’d wake up in the morning and check again. Maybe today would be the day they find another hostage, I thought. Maybe today.

I cling to the stories and videos of hostage releases because I am desperate for the smallest sliver of a happy ending. I am desperate for a world that makes even just a little bit of sense, a world where babies aren’t burned and families aren’t irrevocably broken and erased.

This week, it feels like that world is lost. After a year and a half of praying for the orange-haired Bibas children, we now know 9-month old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel were killed early in their captivity in a demonstration of the purest form of evil known to man. Their mother, Shiri, is missing after being told she, too, was murdered by Gazans, and the lone survivor of this beautiful family, recently released husband Yarden, watches his world crumble around him.

And still, I scour the Internet for more information. More proof of goodness in this world. It is a drug, an addiction. I am bombarded by pictures and videos of the Bibas children. Pictures that will break your heart and then shove the glass splinters under your fingernails for good measure.

In this broken world, everything is personal and personalized. I cannot help but think of my own children, 3 and 6. Like Ariel, my three-year-old Natan loves Batman. He runs around the house in full regalia, calling himself the “caped crusaver.”

He is enamored with the idea of super heroes—and why shouldn’t he be? Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where people with magical capabilities swoop in and save us? If only we had a batman to save Ariel and Kfir. If only we had a batman to save this shattered world of ours.

My “caped crusaver”

And then my mind wanders and returns relentlessly to Yarden Bibas. He survived nearly 500 days of physical and psychological torture only to lose everything that matters to him in the light of day. What are we supposed to do with that kind of cruelty? How is any human supposed to endure that and be whole?

To be Jewish is to be constantly reminded of the evil that exists in our decidedly imperfect universe. This evil lives not just in the killers who wield their weapons, but the demons who celebrate them and the cowards who say and do nothing. But we have a secret weapon. It is also our right as Jews to seek vengeance. Indeed, it is biblically commanded of us at times.

I mean no offense to my Christian friends, but I prefer to hate both the sin and the sinner. Especially today. Especially these sinners who deserve to be hated—and eradicated. Humanity cannot coexist with that kind of evil and survive.

We will avenge Ariel and Kfir. We will avenge the thousands of Jews murdered for the crime of living as a Jew. We will avenge them with bombs and pagers. We will avenge them with more children and families. We will avenge them with our stubborn insistence on existing and persevering. We will avenge them by rebuilding our homes brick by brick, and teaching our children about the children who never got a chance to grow up. We will avenge them by carrying this heavy burden on top of all the burdens bequeathed to us by our history. There is, as Golda Meir often said in Hebrew, “ein breira.” There is no alternative.