One point of agreement

There is so much swirling right now—uncertainty is the only throughline. I’m not just talking about education, though there’s plenty aswirl there. I’m talking all of it—the federal government, wild fires, plane crashes, the war in Ukraine, and the Israel-Gaza quagmire. It’s difficult to know what is true, what is hyperbole, what has actually happened, what remain mere possibilities.

America is a beautifully diverse country that holds multitudes at every moment. I don’t expect us to all agree on much. But could we agree on just one thing? Could we agree that kidnapping and then murdering babies is bad?

Kfir and Ariel Bibas were 9 months and 4 years old, respectively, when they were kidnapped from their home in Israel and taken with their mother, Shiri, to Gaza. They came home this week in coffins. I’m hoping we can agree on one point: that this is not the moral code by which modern civilization should operate.

I’m sorry to hijack my own platform, but I also cannot pretend that this did not occur. Those of us who work in education reform do this work because we believe that children deserve opportunities, that it’s our responsibility and privilege to build a better world for them. I love my work, and I’m proud of what I’ve been a part of across my 20-year career. But I have spent the week thinking about my own Jewish children and how to explain to them the murders of Kfir and Ariel, how to explain the celebrations held in Gaza over their coffins, how to help my kids process the reality that people would celebrate their deaths too.

If you grew up Jewish in 1980s and 1990s America, you grew up with a lot of Holocaust education. Reading “Number the Stars” and “The Devil’s Arithmetic” before moving on to “Night” and “All But My Life.” Watching documentaries, footage from the liberation of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. We listened to Holocaust survivors speak, and we knew which of our friends’ grandparents had their own survivor tales. The idea of “never again” seemed unnecessary as we purchased lotions at The Body Shop and ran on cross-country teams and went off to college. This was America, and the world, at the turn of the 21st century. Freedom and opportunity seemed endless.

Now we wonder if we’ve reached the end.

For sixteen months, the global Jewish community has clung to shreds of hope that Kfir and Ariel were somehow alive. An innocent baby and his sweet older brother. We know their faces, we have seen glimpses of a happy family life. We know now that it ended it in the kind of cold-blooded murder that we thought we left behind in the ghettos of Warsaw and Krakow, in Treblinka and Dachau, in the massacres of Ponary and Babi Yar. The same cold-blooded murder that took the lives of Shahar, Arbel, and Omer, ages 6, 6, and 2. 10-month-old Mila Cohen. Liel and Yanai Hezroni, 12-year-old twins. Yahel Sharabi was 13. There are more.

If you’ve never had to sit with this, I hope you’ll take a moment to consider what your Jewish colleagues, neighbors, and friends have sat with every day for 16 months. We are safe here, in America, for now. Jews have said that in other countries, in other decades, and it has not always remained true. Our safety is relative to whether our fellow Americans can agree that the intentional, planned murder of children goes against our values.

We’re all mourning now. There really aren’t that many of us Jews, and we really are all quite connected. My 14-year-old son was following the news all day yesterday, along with his friends. This is what 8th-grade Jewish kids text about now, murdered babies and missing moms. He asked me for a hug at bedtime. This morning he asked why people would celebrate the death of a baby.

I don’t have an answer. You don’t have an answer. Can we just agree this is wrong? Can we start there?