Yarden Bibas’s eulogy for his family should be a prayer for us all
After an outpouring of Jewish unity, now what?
A crowd watches a live feed from a funeral for Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv on Feb. 26. Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman February 27, 2025
Embedded in Yarden Bibas’s Wednesday eulogy for his wife and young sons was a line that could be a whole prayer.
Standing before the single casket that held their three bodies, he said, “Guard me, so I don’t sink into darkness.”
I can only assume that the darkness he was referring to was personal. But the fact that his wife Shiri, and two sons, Ariel, who was 5 when he was abducted, and Kfir, who was 9 months old, were all killed in Gaza after being kidnapped by terrorists on Oct. 7 came as both a numbing shock and a challenge to Israel as a whole.
How do you react to such brutality without becoming brutal? How do you prevent the senseless deaths of more innocents without causing senseless death? How does a society faced with such darkness move towards light?
The first step is grief. Thousands of Israelis lined the 36-mile funeral route to bid farewell to the Shiri and the children. Some held signs: “Never Forget. Never Forgive.” Some released orange balloons into the winter air.
For over a year now, when masses of Israelis have gathered, it’s been to protest against, or for, their government. The Bibas murders brought Israelis of all persuasions together for a different purpose.
And they weren’t grieving alone. The Bibas funeral brought American, Israeli and world Jewry together into a single congregation of mourning, more than any other event since Oct. 7. Students at UC Berkeley erected an orange tent in their honor. Some 15,000 Jews in Argentina gathered to mourn the Bibases, who held dual Argentine-Israeli citizenship. The Empire State Building was lit up in orange, a commemoration of the children’s red hair. It’s a sad truism of Jewish life that nothing unites us like sorrow.
Oct. 7 took many innocent lives, but the Bibas boys became a symbol of lost innocence itself. It has been impossible to look away from their story, amid all the numbing tragedies of the last 16 months. I know more about their family than I do about some of my own relatives.
I know that Yarden called his children, “my Yemenite redheads.” That to Ariel, Batman was everything. That Yarden and Shiri shared a love for a sugar and oatmeal “crack pie.” That they called each other “mi amor.”
Their love didn’t disappear into the grave. The funeral we all collectively witnessed, if anything, gave it new life.
So what do we do with it?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed revenge.
“We will ensure that Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and evil violation of the agreement,” Netanyahu said when the children came back dead, and Hamas initially returned a body that wasn’t Shiri’s.
I understand that. But at least one member of the Bibas family herself pointed out that it was Israel’s own desire for revenge that may have cost the Bibases their lives.
“Our disaster as a people and as a family should not have happened, and it must not, must not happen again,” Ofri Bibas, Yarden’s sister, said at the funeral, addressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “They could have saved you and preferred revenge.”
Online, where words are cheapest, the cries for revenge are loudest. As the Forward reported, following news of the Bibas murders, Jewish influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers began approvingly posting excerpts from speeches by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who preached the violent removal of Arabs from Israel.
I get it: Extremism births extremism. People whose only exposure to Kahane is a meme quote or a YouTube edit may not understand why the Israel outlawed his party, the United States deemed him a terrorist and the Anti-Defamation League listed Betar, the organizational heir to his teaching, as an extremist group. His disciples assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; massacred peaceful Muslims at prayer; assassinated one Arab-American leader, Alex Odeh, in Southern California, and plotted to blow up others. You don’t stop Hamas by becoming Hamas.
So if revenge is not the takeaway, what is?
The Bibas family has made it clear, as have other families who have suffered in Gaza’s tunnels, that the first priority must be freeing the hostages. American Jews who at least figuratively stood side by side in mourning with them must impress upon President Donald Trump that whatever else he has in store for Gaza, nothing matters more than freeing the 24 hostages believed to still be alive.
After that, it may be impossible to talk of peace just now, when the funeral procession has so recently passed. But this conflict has produced thousands of child-sized graves, and it is just as inconceivable that the killing of more Israeli or Palestinian children will make any side safer.
If there is a solution, we’ll find it somewhere in Yarden Bibas’s words: Guard us, so we don’t sink into darkness.
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