Noah, it should be all of our torment, not just Israel’s. (While, of course, the intimacy and intensity and existential nature of the Israeli experience can never be fully shared.) We should all stand in solidarity with the heartache and the outrage.

There was this moment after the initial murderous attacks when I would see non-Jews approach men in kippahs on an Amtrak train, in a restaurant, on a street, and say some words of condolence and respect. We should be renewed in that moment. And do an examination of conscience regarding how we have allowed most of our lives to resume as usual while these Bibas twins and their mother have been over there — dead or alive. The family aspect of this story should rock us to the core.

God bless Bethany Mandel, who is helping members of the Bibas family get to Israel.

Her husband, Seth, writes:

 “For many Israelis,” the New York Times writes, “the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.”

That sentence is accurate. But in another universe, one where the “international community” cares a whit for justice and human decency, the sentence would read this way: “For everyone, the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.”

In such a world, the faces of the Bibas children would be everywhere at all times. In the world in which we live, by contrast, posters with those faces get torn down from bulletin boards. In the kind of world we hope to deserve to inhabit, no children’s charity or NGO would go a day without drawing attention to Kfir and Ariel and the monsters who stole them.

The crimes against the Bibas family are indeed the symbol of the anti-civilizational menace that is Hamas—but also of the cowardice of the political and cultural leaders of the enlightened West.

I see those innocent faces from the Holocaust that the Auschwitz memorial in Poland posts on social media daily and wonder if the words “Never again” ever had meaning.