Darkness and light, disaster and rescue — we saw both, all in the space of a working day. Which to focus on?

Ariel and Kfir Bibas Hy"d (PHOTO: HOSTAGE FAMILY FORUM)

S

ome things you just never forget. Some things once seen, can’t be unseen. I suspect that the Bibas picture is one of them.

The image of Shiri — a frozen scream on her face, hugging her two ginger-haired tots close as evil incarnate closes in — ranks among the most horrific of October 7.

There were far more graphic shots, obviously — scenes that make tough men retch. But in that strange, unerring process by which icons are born, we all zeroed in on that picture as a symbol.

For the last year and a half, the fate of the “gingim,” as Israelis came to know the redheads, became a sort of unspoken barometer of the war. Intellectually, we knew that there was little chance they would come back. How could toddlers survive the Hamas dungeons any more than babies could survive Auschwitz? Would those who’d burned infants on that horrific day prove more merciful six months later?

And yet, an entire country agonized over their fate. A flash of red hair among a crowd of Gazans in the early part of the war set off a viral paroxysm of agony. The discovery of diapers in a Hamas tunnel brought fresh grief, and new hope.

Reason warred with longing, pessimism with prayer. Amid the pain, there was a sense that if only those sweet, innocent boys could be brought back into their mother’s arms, the world wouldn’t be such a terrible place, after all.

On Thursday, we discovered that it is. Oh, it is.

Even before it was clear that Hamas had cynically failed to return Shiri’s remains, even before we knew that mother and children had been murdered with horrific brutality, the sheer cruelty of it all stunned what remains of the civilized world.

The macabre theater of death — armed goons, black coffins, auto-da-fé crowds — was designed to assure us that our worst nightmares are true.

By late Thursday, the cloud of depression hanging over the country was palpable. When you face the unspeakable, what is there to say?

That was Part 1 of a dark day. A few hours later, came Part 2. Sitting by the computer, vainly trying to make emotional sense of the senseless, I read the reports of explosions at bus depots in Bat Yam and Holon.

It soon became clear that only a miracle had prevented carnage. The details are still under gag order, but from what it seems it was only a beginner’s blunder that prevented a Second Intifada-style massacre on the transit network on Friday morning.

It’s hard to fathom, but the planners of this attack evaded all of the sophistication of Israel’s security state — and then committed a cartoonish error worthy of a mustachioed Balkan bandit. On the sliding scale of hidden miracles, this one plays in the first division.

It’s a sign both of how bad the times are and of how inured we are to the miraculous that this failed plot got very little airtime. The fact that up to a dozen bombs had simply failed to go off at the right time was lost in the news cycle. By the time  Shabbos shopping had concluded, the story was old.

That combination of events is the reason why, for days now, a few words have been running through my mind on a loop, like a chyron out of control.

They’re beautiful words from Yeshayahu (54) — popularized by singer Avrumi Flam a couple of decades ago — that send a chill up the spine.

“B’shetzef ketzef histarti Panai rega mimeich — With a slight anger I’ve concealed My Face momentarily from you,” but “Uvchessed olam richamtich — With eternal kindness I’ll show you mercy,” says Hashem.

In other words, however endless the pain of exile appears, whatever sea of sorrow we’re currently drowning in, will be as nothing to the infinite ocean of comfort that will one day be our lot.

Last Thursday, that verse in its entirety suddenly walked off the pages of Neviim into our lives.

Within a few short hours, we experienced ketzef — Divine anger in all its power, the fuse that was lit on October 7 and never extinguished.

The horror of that day came back to us in a rush. The despair, the powerlessness, the feeling of Jewish vulnerability that our generation had imagined it would never experience.

But hot on its heels came rachamim — the scarcely-credible tales of a mega-bombing averted, of terrorists befuddled by their own foolishness. True, it was the revelation of still more hate from our next-door neighbors, but beggars can’t be choosers — we woke up to find that our enemies had foiled themselves.

Those 12 hours were a microcosm of our new normal. The default seems to be hester Panim — the frightening absence of Divine help, where Jews are once again the butt of a cruel joke. But in between is the opposite — he’aras Panim, the Heavenly favor that manifests as unexpected success.

They’re things like the abnormal failure of the Iranian missile attacks, or the beeper bombs that felled an army — all natural, explicable phenomena, but whose startling triumph tell us that we’re not alone.

Like bolts of lightning against a black night sky, these occasional flashes of success reveal the way forward. After they fade, the darkness closes in once again, but for a time we know that there’s a path along the precipice.

Darkness and light, disaster and rescue — we saw both, all in the space of a working day. Which to focus on?

The answer is obviously, both.

To rhapsodize about the future while the present is so grim feels both out of touch and wrong. It would ignore the suffering of so many like Yarden Bibas who has to rebuild from nothing as he mourns Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir.

But we’re capable of holding two thoughts. We’ll have no trouble remembering the gingim — their faces and fates are burned into our collective retina — but so, too, we should make an effort to remember the bolts of blessing that come our way, to ensure that they inspire us slightly longer than one news cycle.

Because surely this constant emotional yo-yo is all part and parcel of the end of history. And those occasional tales of terrorists defeating themselves are like jagged forks of illumination.

We’re living through dark times, they seem to say — but somewhere up ahead, a new light shines. —

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1051)