Some days, the memory of Hamas’s October 7 attack is crippling, and today is one of those days, because baby Kfir Bibas’s smile entered my mind, and it hasn’t left.
And we still don’t know where he is, or with whom he’s hidden, or if he’s alive, and it’s so cruel that his surviving relatives should ever have to wonder such things. Kfir, who is one and a half, has spent more life in captivity than he has in freedom, presumably.
Charles Krauthammer published a column about evil in the weeks after 9/11, one that I reread every year. He wrote that victims never really know “the depths of their enemy’s evil.” It seems impossible to imagine that Israel has not yet discovered the true depths of Hamas’s evil, but until Kfir is rescued, it is entirely possible.
This sort of evil is one that stretches the imagination to its breaking point; the mind can’t comprehend that Kfir is not alive somewhere. Ensnared by this naivety, I can’t, and won’t, believe that the same terrorists who burned whole families alive and mutilated young women’s sexual organs have killed, or done worse, to Kfir or his brother Ariel, 4.
Confident that the nature of evil in this case is unknown, we must instead turn to that which, with certainty, we can know: that our God is one who hears our prayers and turns darkness to light. There is no other solace.