As I sit here in my Jerusalem apartment holding my 10 month-old daughter, I can’t help but think about 9 month-old Kfir, scared and alone in Gaza, or how 3 year-old Avigail, lonely and terrified, may not know yet that she is now an orphan.
It breaks my heart to think that my baby girl shares an identity with these children. She is an Israeli Jew. She was born in this land, and she is not a citizen of any other country.
So many Israelis and supporters of Israel have shared images of Israeli soldiers being depicted as lions leading a pack to attack, with the lionesses behind him. I think it would be more accurate if this was shown the other way around.
Every lioness of Israel feels personally attacked in this assault. We feel that we have deceived and lied to our own children when we told them that monsters aren’t real, that their rooms were safe.
Our homes have been robbed of any sense of safety. When I see bedrooms meant for children to sleep peacefully and wake for a brand new day, covered in blood and ransacked, I see my daughter’s room.
These rooms were set up to be safe for precious young children, nurseries set up even before the baby was born, destroyed and desecrated. I see the beating heart of the Jewish nation, the passionate emphasis on education, on communally raising our children with values, hacked to pieces. It is an attack on all Jewish mothers, especially those of us in the land of Israel.
I’m constantly experiencing all this from the perspective of a mother. When I lay my daughter down in her bed and recite the Sh’ma Yisrael and sing HaMalaḥ HaGoel to her, I think about the children who were sung those same songs one Friday night for the last time. Songs that mean HaShem is One and that the angel who has protected me from evil, should bless these children, invoking the names of our ancestors who enjoyed Divine protection in this land.
After learning about the horrific attacks by Hamas on Simḥat Torah, we started to prepare our environment for safety while stories emerged from the south of parents risking and sometimes sacrificing themselves to save their children, and I felt privileged that our family had been afforded time to prepare ourselves when so many families were not.
As I learn about the plight of babies and young children who were miraculously saved by hiding in the closet, my heart breaks further. Images surface in my mind of the 10 month-old twin boys found after many hours without comfort, kisses, a new diaper, food or water. I think of my 10 month-old and how she signs for milk, food, a diaper change and sleep and shudder imagining how it would feel for her to be trapped in a dark room with no one seeing her signs or responding to her cries.
The sheer desperation of these children overwhelms me and leaves me distraught.
To be a mother after the attack is to feel unbelievably lucky to have a child crying for my attention. Lucky that I can play with her and take care of her unlike so many families that were torn apart, their loved ones taken from them, massacred or abducted.
I think about the mothers who survived the horrors of that day and have woken up every morning since knowing that their babies were stolen no matter how old they are now in Gaza.
Are they alive?
Are they cared for?
What does a child do all day while awaiting its rescue?
Their parents aren’t there to help organize the madness around them or to help them emotionally regulate. There are no words for the trauma they must be experiencing. There seems to be no way to move on, to live normally, to continue.
It’s important to feel these feelings, to let the tears fall, and to process and digest the gravity of what happened to us – to allow ourselves to get to a place where we ensure this doesn’t happen EVER again.
Jewish mothers won’t forget what was done to Am Yisrael and we won’t forget the world’s refusal to believe what was done to us and their dismissal of our pain. We won’t rest until our country is finally safe and our children can play without fear.
