The Weight of Seeing

In the gathering dusk of a Jerusalem evening, I walk home with my daughters from gymnastics, their small hands trading turns with mine, their bodies still humming with the evening’s exertions. The streets we traverse are papered with faces – hundreds of them, their eyes following us home. These are the hostages’ posters that have become part of our city’s skin, as familiar now as the limestone walls that rise around us, their pale faces catching the last light.

Eden, my younger one, breaks the rhythm of our footsteps: “Ima, can you take a picture of me when we get home?”

“Sure, why?” I answer, my voice light, my mind still trailing in the mundane wake of gymnastics class, parent pickup, dinner plans. But her response crashes through this thin veneer of normalcy, transforming the familiar evening air into something heavier, darker: “So if I’m taken as hatufa, you can have a picture for the Hostages poster.”

The words land like stones in still water. A pregnant pause swells between us, heavy with all the things a mother cannot promise. “Eden, you are safe,” I say finally, the words feeling both necessary and insufficient. “You are not going to be taken as a hostage.”

My older daughter’s voice cuts through the twilight: “I bet the people who are hostages also thought they were safe.” 

My daughters, who still sleep each night with rabbit and bear pressed close, have absorbed this new reality like children absorb so much—completely, matter-of-factly, weaving it into the fabric of their understanding like a dark thread through lighter cloth.

How do we speak of such things? When friends ask how we are doing, my tongue ties itself in knots of privilege and pain, of narrative and counter-narrative. The question itself has become a palimpsest, written over with layers of meaning I cannot fully excavate. There is a simple truth: we are fine. We have no loved ones dead, none among the hostages, no home reduced to rubble. We count our blessings like worry beads. But beneath this accounting lies a deeper complexity – how to speak of our genuine fear and grief without feeding into the neat fables of victimhood that transform every Israeli anxiety into justification for unbounded violence, that collapse all nuance into a simple story of good versus evil? How to hold our real vulnerability alongside our real complicity? The narrative of perpetual victimhood, seamlessly stitching October 7th into a tapestry of historical trauma, serves those who would use it to justify the unjustifiable – the bombs falling on Gaza, the children buried in pajamas under rubble, the starving of a nation, the slow strangling of hope for any future that might hold us all.

And yet.

And yet my daughter contemplates her own hostage poster with the same practical consideration she gives to choosing her school clothes. And yet her sister understands, with devastating clarity, how quickly safety can become an illusion. The air itself feels thinner now, less trustworthy. We live beneath the curved steel sky of kipat barzel (the Iron Dome), that marvel of military technology supported by American taxpayers – the same funds that help send two-thousand-pound bombs arcing through Gaza’s air, turning apartment buildings to dust, a homeland into a moonscape, transforming civilian lives into casualty statistics too numerous to comprehend. 

Safety, we are learning, has become a theoretical concept like the horizon – visible but unreachable, its promise receding with each step taken in its direction. It reads like a contronym, protection and destruction bound in the same letters. We are safe and we are complicit in others’ lack of safety, protected and implicated, secure and deeply unsettled.

The violence radiates outward like ripples in a poisoned pond. It seeps under doors and through windows, finds its way into children’s dreams and mothers’ prayers. The suffering knows no borders – it echoes in the wails of mothers in Gaza, in the silence of empty kibbutzim, the cries of mothers on Kaplan, the kaddish we hear at shul, in the casual way my daughter contemplates catastrophe.

When people ask how we are doing, perhaps the truest answer would be: we are holding many things at once. We are grateful for our relative security and haunted by its precariousness. We are safe and we are not safe. We are fine and we are not fine. We are walking home from gymnastics class, discussing being a hostage in a hostage poster, living in a space where every truth splinters into its opposite, where our fear is both real and weaponized, where our safety and others’ suffering are bound together in knots we cannot untangle. 

My daughters move ahead of me in the streetlight, already drifting toward other thoughts – homework, dinner, the day’s small dramas. Children are elastic that way, bending rather than breaking under the weight of adult fears. But I remain caught in that moment, in the way they have incorporated the unthinkable into their every day.

This too is part of their inheritance: this ability to dance on the knife’s edge between ordinary life and extraordinary circumstance. It is a skill no child should have to learn, yet here we are, watching them navigate a world we never wanted them to know.

The faces on the walls watch us complete our journey home. In the gathering dark, they seem to glow with their own light, these paper witnesses to a collective unraveling. I want to say that this moment has reshaped my children’s understanding of safety, but perhaps that’s too clean a line between before and after. Children have always known the world’s precarity – they feel it in their bones before they have words for it, carry it in their play and their prayers, their stuffed animals and their sudden questions. What’s changed is more subtle and more seismic: fear has become explicit rather than implicit, violence has pressed itself against our windows until the glass has begun to warp. 

We are all transformed—children and adults alike—by the weight of what we can no longer pretend not to see, by the stories we can no longer tell ourselves about safety, about distance, about who we are and are not.

—Stephanie Pell (J.D., M.P.H.) lives in Jerusalem with her spouse and three children.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ She is a member of Lilith’s 2025 New 40 Cohort.