By Esti DeAngelis, Opinions Editor
“I never met you, but I miss you.” This is a sentiment I’ve heard more than any other since the bodies of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were returned to Israel for burial in February. It may sound completely illogical, but logic can’t explain small children in large coffins. Logic can’t explain one father left all alone.
And yet, here we are, mourning three people we never met as if we knew them all our lives. The sensation is strange; for most of our lives we didn’t know you even existed, and now we can’t figure out how to live without you. Somehow, two red-headed babies and their mother planted themselves firmly inside our hearts without us ever knowing them, so firmly that this loss has left national exit wounds.
What does it mean to grieve for someone you never met? That’s the question that really gets me. The character of the grief, the way it feels like we’re mourning people we’ve known an eternity. The way it feels like we’re incomplete now. I keep coming back to it. We must have known you for longer than we did. I can’t make sense of this pain otherwise.
A teacher once taught me that the way we make G-d’s Unity manifest in the world, the way His Oneness is expressed, is when the Jewish people are themselves united. In other words, when we are one, everyone sees that G-d is One. This makes me think that there’s something deeply spiritual about grief. There’s something Divine in feeling a oneness with the entire Jewish nation. When a piece of that whole breaks off, maybe it is natural to cry, even for those we never knew. Maybe we feel a part of our heart breaking off, even if we didn’t know that part was there in the first place.
Maybe sometimes two little boys and their heroic mother come along and remind us of this deep spiritual unity among the Jewish people. When we lose the most precious among us, perhaps it is G-d saying that we did know them, the way we know every Jew, in some deeply spiritual, wordless part of ourselves.
And so maybe this grief has something G-dly to it too.
Perhaps that’s why the connection was so natural. Because the second we saw you, you felt like family. In truth you always were, and so our hearts screamed out, Hey, I know them! And the strands connected and we were bonded. That is to say, we always were bonded, but now we know it. And the connection becomes stronger with this knowledge.
Suddenly the years we spent not knowing you have to be made up for, like discovering long-lost family members. Shared spiritual DNA connects us biologically; filling in the names and faces on the family tree is something beyond the science of this world.
But you were gone too soon. And so we make up for lost time without you being here, grasping at anything to celebrate our love for those we never met but always knew. Every Batman-loving little boy has something of you in them, Ariel. They always did, but now we know it. Every laughing baby attaches us to you, Kfir. And every mother who protects her children in her arms carries on your legacy, Shiri.
To grieve three people we never knew is to say that we did know them on some level, not just through staring at their pictures and thinking about them, but intrinsically. And so the loss touches all of us too. And the grief is logical in the end because you were family all along.
Now I can speak of grief the way grief ought to be spoken of. No more problematizing; everything reminds us of you. I see you in every orange-haired little kid I pass by; in the stop signal at the crosswalk; and in the tiny orange flowers on the pattern of the skirt I’m wearing right now. I see you in sunsets and sunrises too, in those most of all.
I think of a picture from the morning of your funeral. Israelis lined the streets to accompany you, and above them the sun was coming up in streaks of orange. In my mind, this was G-d’s way of telling us in the only color we understand that He has you. It’s a sign in the sky big enough to cover in orange glow everyone who’s missing you, big enough to cover an entire nation.
Sometimes grief looks like a sunrise.
Photo Caption: Hostage Square, Tel Aviv on Ariel Bibas’s fifth birthday
Photo Credit: Emily Goldberg