The Hell of Antisemitism

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

Monday, February 24, 2025

 

The piano had clearly been through hell. It’s just a piano, of course. Except that this instrument once made beautiful music at the hands of Oded Lifshitz, an 83-year-old who spent 503 days in Hamas captivity — or at least his body did. And so it can never be a mere piano again. It is a relic of martyrdom, an artifact of an ongoing war — a hell on earth for hostages and families living a prolonged agony. It can never be forgotten. Oded Lifshitz was from Kibbutz Nir Oz. He was kidnapped alongside his wife, Yocheved Lifshitz, from their home. He was lying at the edge of his property with a gunshot wound the last time she saw him.

 

The proper response to the confirmed murder of Oded is: May his memory be a blessing. Which requires that we remember him. We must know him and how he lived and how he was murdered. We must speak of him. We must say “Never again” — which, at the very least, means not forgetting. His life. His death. And the morning that his body was returned to Israel.

 

It was horrific enough to watch the demonic dance that surrounded Hamas’s release of the hostages’ bodies: Oded and two precious children, Ariel and Kfir Bibas. And we thought — we were told — that the boys’ mother, Shiri, was in one of the coffins, marked with the day of their “arrest,” that were returned that somber morning. Every aspect of the exchange was evil, and men and children celebrated. We would later learn that Hamas had lied. Imagine that. There was an anonymous corpse, instead of Shiri’s body, in the fourth coffin that was returned that morning. As the Red Cross unwittingly participated in this breaking of the terms of the cease-fire, the pain of the Bibas family was only made worse.

 

When terrorists unleashed their barbaric rage on Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, Oded was “shot in his arm when he was holding the handle of the safe room,” according to his son. Yocheved, his wife, was among the first hostages released, hoping against hope.

 

There’s a video of Oded playing that piano during what seem to be simpler times. Except they had a room in their house to retreat to during rocket attacks — or worse. Such is life for a Jew in Israel. Today, Oded’s musical performance appears as a prayer for miracles. A prayer for peace seems naïve, even if peace is the right thing to plea for, while every human instinct cries out for justice and avenging.

Another video that has been circulated shows the day Ariel met his little brother. It’s a display of such pure joy. It’s everything important in the world — new life and family, and people rejoicing in both. Every image of the Bibas boys smiling, or their mother desperately and heroically trying to protect them from Hamas, is a reminder of the torment of their father, who was recently released by the terrorist group. It’s a torment shared by the people of Israel and Jews around the world — all of whom know that the family was targeted simply because they were Jewish. As humans, we should all share in their torment. We ought not to see this as but another passing news story. If I had a dollar for every person who confessed to me that they didn’t really know about the Bibas boys, we might have set up a scholarship fund, for which these children will never have the need. When you add to the picture the fact that Oded was a peace activist, having participated in regular outreach and humanitarian efforts in Gaza, we enter into the madness of evil — and the absurdly peculiar and particular evil that is antisemitism.

The ballad of the Bibas family and the Jewish people continues to be Psalm 31:

 

I have become like a broken vessel.

I hear the whispering of many — terror on every side! —

as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.

But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, “You are my God.”

 

And yet, trust can be hard to come by when nothing much makes sense and the world seems somewhat silent. Even the promise of the president of the United States to bulldoze Gaza doesn’t seem right. The evil calls for something more solemn, more intimate. In the days after the initial attacks on the Israeli people, I saw non-Jews approaching Jews to say “Hello” and “I’m sorry” and “I’m praying” — and I did so myself sometimes. It’s not much. It’s not enough. But at least it’s not silence in the face of evil. Recent parades of freed hostages, resembling Holocaust survivors, have happened via live-stream. Even though we do most days, we cannot go on as if this is merely something happening elsewhere in the world, to other people. Here, in my New York, there are still pro-Hamas outbursts in the streets, most recently in Brooklyn.

 

“When the Palestinians have nothing to lose, we will lose, big time,” Oded Lifshitz once wrote. “The question is, what do we do then?” It’s not just a question for Israel. What does the Christian do for the Jewish family next door? This question matters, and it matters for individuals and cultures even more than does weighing in on policy proposals for two-state or other solutions. This question, and the actions it encourages, would recognize the pain of Dana Silverman Seaton, the sister of Shiri Bibas, who mourns her sister, parents, and nephews. And the pain of her brother-in-law. Their torment should not be foreign to us. We must enter in and give meaning to “Never again.” Or else our consciences have been deadened by the forces of hell.