I'm So Sorry, Beautiful Babies

My four year old is obsessed with being four. Every morning, when I get her ready for school, she says, I am four years old! (According to her, I am three.) She has such pride in being four. She is so big, she tells me. She is a big girl. Her brother is a baby. They are so big and yet so small. They have hardly been here for any of my life, and yet I cannot imagine my life without them. They have been siblings for less than a year, and yet they are so bonded to each other. They smile when they see each other. The baby touches the preschooler’s face, the preschooler makes the baby laugh. They take such joy in each other, and in being part of our beautiful little family. I pray that they will bring each other joy and love for their whole lives, until they are 120, until forever and ever.

Every night, before I put the baby to bed, the preschooler yells to him, Good night, we love you! Last night, sheltered under the tent of that pure love, I held my eight month old baby and sang him Hamalach before I put him in his crib. Usually, honestly, I am ready to put my kids to bed as soon as they are willing to go. But last night, I held onto him for a few extra minutes. He was squirming; he wanted to roll and play. But I needed to feel the weight of his body in my arms and know he was safe.

So he squirmed and I sang and I cried. I sang him the words of the blessing Yaakov gave to Yosef and to his grandchildren:

הַמַּלְאָךְ֩ הַגֹּאֵ֨ל אֹתִ֜י מִכּל־רָ֗ע יְבָרֵךְ֮ אֶת־הַנְּעָרִים֒ וְיִקָּרֵ֤א בָהֶם֙ שְׁמִ֔י וְשֵׁ֥ם אֲבֹתַ֖י אַבְרָהָ֣ם וְיִצְחָ֑ק וְיִדְגּ֥וּ לָרֹ֖ב בְּקֶ֥רֶב הָאָֽרֶץ׃

May the angel who has saved me from all evil bless the young ones.
In them may my name be recalled, and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac,
And may they be teeming multitudes upon the earth.

Yaakov’s words are not obvious. When he met Pharoah just one chapter earlier, he tells him that the years of his life had been “short and hard,” surely remembering the times when everything went wrong. I imagine him thinking about how he stole a blessing from his father, fled his brother who wanted to kill him, watched his beloved wife die on the side of the road, and spent many years separated from his son Yosef, thinking he was dead. And yet, when Yaakov faces his own death, he speaks of “the angel that has protected him from all evil.” It feels to me like a prayer. Yaakov has not had a life free of pain and evil. His beloved Yosef has not either. But he hopes that maybe his grandsons will be protected as he will not, such that they will be safe and loved—such that they will be able to thrive.

This is what any parent wants for their child. For them to be loved and safe, so they can thrive. But the reality of a world where this is not the case is so close right now. So I held my eight month old and heard my four year old filibustering bedtime in the other room. And as I sang, I thought, please God, protect these children from all evil. Even as I knew it would inevitably not be so.

My children are four years old and eight months old, just like Ariel and Kfir Bibas were when they were ripped away from their lives by terrorists. My children look at each other with the same joy that we see in the pictures of the brothers together, before their lives were stolen from them. Kfir and my daughter share a birthday, two years apart. Kfir’s smile took up half his face, just like my son’s. Ariel’s hair looks soft with baby curls, just like my daughter’s. He holds up his drawings with pride, just like my daughter does when we take her art from her backpack. Just like my children, Ariel and Kfir were just becoming who they would have been, a process that is astonishing and surprising even as it is the most natural thing in the world. Their mother Shiri held them tight and looked at them with the deepest love, just like I do every day when my babies come home, if only for a moment before they squirm away.

My babies are safe. Through an accident of birth, and the logistics of visas from Europe in the 1930s, my Jewish babies are in America, but in a different reality, they could also have been in Israel. I am raising two beautiful Jewish babies in a world where the light of two other beautiful Jewish babies has been extinguished by hatred and violence. But for the grace of God and an accident of history, my babies are here, and the Bibas babies are not.

“The one who saved me from all evil,” Yaakov says. There is so much evil in the world. We can never be saved from all of it. We cannot protect our children from all of it. It is evil that people murder children. It is evil that Ariel and Kfir had their lives wrenched away from them. It is evil that they were murdered with their mother. It is evil that they won’t get to grow up, and that their father will have to speak of his sons in past tense. It is evil that too many people put their selfish desire for power and destructive ideologies ahead of saving babies. We can’t protect our babies from all evil. But we could have done more. Ariel and Kfir, I am so sorry we failed you.