Endless Hope: On Shiri Bibas and the Eternal Jewish Spirit
Way down deep in our hearts, we all know it's likely they didn't survive, but we haven't given up hoping or praying, and we won't, until we know for sure.


There's a photo I can't stop looking at: Shiri Bibas's flame-red hair caught in morning light, her baby Kfir nestled against her chest, four-year-old Ariel clutching her hand. It was taken before October 7th, before the world saw that haunting footage of her clutching her children, being led away from Kibbutz Nir Oz in the early morning darkness. Before hope became such a heavy thing to carry.
We know what the rational mind tells us about Shiri and her babies now. We've heard Hamas's November announcement claiming they died in an airstrike in Khan Yunis, watched as they were transferred between militant groups, marked the endless days without proof of life. We've learned that baby Kfir, just nine months old when taken, faced nearly impossible odds of survival in those conditions. Logic whispers what we fear most: that mother and children, with their matchstick-bright hair, are lost to us forever.
And yet.
And yet we continue to pray. Yet we still speak of them in present tense. Yet we hold their pictures high at rallies and print their faces on posters and whisper their names in synagogues across the world. This isn't denial – it's something deeper, more essential to who we are as a people.
Throughout our history, Jews have been characterized by an almost irrational attachment to hope. We built families in ghettos, wrote poetry in camps, planted gardens in desert soil. When logic dictated despair, we chose faith. When reality suggested surrender, we chose tomorrow.
Yarden Bibas has been released now, carrying with him the weight of knowing what happened that morning – the terror, the violence, the last glimpse of his family being taken away. Even as the Mujahideen Brigades held them separately, even after Hamas's unverified claims of their deaths, even now, he joins our collective refusal to abandon hope without absolute certainty. The absence of proof has become both torture and comfort – a space where dread and hope wage their endless battle.
Some might call this delusion. I call it the deepest wisdom of a people who have learned that survival sometimes means believing in impossible things. We are the descendants of those who watched the Red Sea part, who kept a temple flame burning for eight days on one day's oil, who returned to their homeland after two thousand years of exile. Our history is a testament to the power of improbable hopes.
So we continue to pray for Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas. We pray knowing what we know, and we pray anyway. We pray because that's what Jews do in the dark – we light candles, we tell stories, we choose hope over probability. We pray because sometimes, in the long arc of Jewish history, miracles do happen.
And if – may it never be so – our worst fears are confirmed, then we will have lost nothing by hoping. We will have demonstrated once again that core principle of Jewish survival: that even in our deepest grief, we choose life, we choose hope, we choose to believe in tomorrow.
In the end, this may be our greatest strength as a people: not that we are blind to darkness, but that we insist on searching for light within it. Not that we deny reality, but that we refuse to let reality have the final word. Not that we don't know the odds, but that we have spent thousands of years defying them.
So we will continue to speak of Shiri and her children in present tense. We will continue to pray. We will continue to hope, because hope itself is an act of resistance, an affirmation of life, a declaration that darkness will not have the final word.
This is what we do. This is who we are. This is how we survive.
And somewhere, perhaps, a mother with flame-red hair holds her children close and whispers the same prayers we do, waiting for the moment when hope becomes reality, when prayer becomes rescue, when darkness gives way to dawn.
Until then, we hope. Until then, we pray. Until then, we remember that we are the people who have always believed in impossible things, and sometimes – just sometimes – impossible things come true.