A Single Death

You may not be familiar with Omri Lavi, a 25-year-old redhead whose life was cut short on October 7, 2023. You probably do know of two redheaded boys, Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who were abducted that same day and buried this past Wednesday, despite having been strangled to death over a year earlier.

I don’t know any of the names of the 62,000 Christians murdered by Islamic jihadist groups in Nigeria since the year 2000 (Genocide Watch). Or the names of Christians slaughtered in recent years in Iraq and Libya – having been expelled from those countries, Jews escaped those murderous waves.

As the saying, often attributed to Stalin, goes, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” We might add a modern variation, “A single death broadcast on social media is noticed; thousands of deaths not splashed on screens are ignored.”

In the Jewish community, we’ve begun hearing a phrase: “October 8th Jews.” It refers to those who once believed that anti-Semitism was a relic of the past or who assumed their Jewish identity didn’t matter. After being shunned by fellow students and cursed by coworkers, after watching people celebrate the rape and torture of Israeli women, they’ve realized how wrong they were. Evil is alive and well.

Why do we not talk of September 12th (2001) Americans? Or January 8th (2015) French, following the shooting at the Charlie Hebdo offices? I could pick hundreds of other days when Islamic terror erupted, when we viscerally reacted for a while and then went back to ‘normal’ lives.

We are rarely grateful for something that we take for granted. We appreciate our ability to swallow after a few painful days with a sore throat; we shed tears of happiness for waking up in a warm house after shivering through mornings with a broken heater. The more we expect life to flow smoothly, the more entitled to a pleasant existence we feel, the less we recognize how blessed we are.

I am not an October 8th Jewish mother. As I held my infants and rocked my toddlers to sleep in safety, I was acutely aware that this was not the norm. Unseen in the room with me were, quite literally, millions of Jewish mothers over millennia who had not been granted that blessing. While my heart ached as I watched Shiri Bibas attempt to shield her babies, I didn’t see her as an outlier. She was joining a line of similarly broken-hearted women through the ages.

I am deeply moved by the outpouring of support for Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel Bibas as their bodies came home. But I worry that the emotional tug we feel from seeing their precious faces is fleeting. More troubling, the feeling that “I am mourning for them” is misplaced. Every decent person is at risk when a demonic ideology runs rampant. Our lives are full and busy—but they are also fragile. I pray that the world is waking up.

With a broken heart: Kfir, Ariel, and Shiri Bibas

Omri Lavi

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