Grief and the Bibas family

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come….
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

There’s nothing Jewish about this poem fragment — it’s the first and last verses of W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” — but grief is universal.

We knew that the two little red-headed Bibas boys, Ariel and Kfir, and their mother, Shiri, probably were dead. They hadn’t been released when the other children and mothers were set free. We saw Shiri clutching her babies, we saw the look on her face — a look that we never should have to see on any human being’s face, much less the face of a mother holding her small children — and then we never saw her again.

We knew that her parents, José Luis Silberman and Margit Shnaider Silberman, were murdered on October 7. We knew that her husband, Yarden, was held hostage for almost 500 days and then released on February 1, gaunt, emaciated, hoping against hope that his wife and sons still were alive.

We do not know how such cruelty is possible. Most of us — I hope all of us — cannot imagine how even the most raging and irrational hatred, no matter how rooted in politics, history, or theology, could lead to the kidnapping, torture, and eventual murder of small children and their mother.

Now, all we can do is mourn. We mourn at a remove, of course; family and friends feels the deepest, most soul-crushing grief. But those of us here — those of us who walked by the hostage posters with the little redheads smiling out at us; those of us who compulsively read every story mentioning them, and found our eyes tearing every time; those of us who, like a friend I know, put photos of the family near her candles, so she would see them as she welcomed in Shabbat; those of us who have children, or have loved children — mourn too.

We long for a day when the next little Bibas boys can grow into adulthood and have redheaded children of their own, and their parents can ease into grandparenthood together. That day is not this day. That world is not this world.

May that world come to us soon.

—JP

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