There is a difference between a broken heart and a broken spirit.
Israel’s broken heart was on full display on Wednesday at the funeral procession for Kfir, Ariel, and Shiri Bibas, brutally murdered in Hamas captivity in 2023; their bodies were returned only last week.
Its spirit was on display, too. But the spirit was not broken.
The broken heart was in the tears of the tens of thousands of Israelis who lined the roads as the van carrying the bodies passed from Rishon Lezion to the Tzohar cemetery in the South, where the three were buried together in the same grave – fitting, given how Shiri, as the world saw in that harrowing video from October 7, tried to shield and protect her children.
It was in the procession itself – so many people turning out on a cold morning to pay their final respects to Shiri and her sons and to send a collective embrace to her husband, Yarden, the family’s only surviving member.
It was in the simple, one-word, handwritten signs held up along the route: slicha (sorry), and in the words of those who stood there, saying they had come because it was the only way to express their pain for a family they had never met but felt deeply connected to.
National farewell
The funeral procession was for Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel, but not only for them. It took on the feel of a national farewell for all those murdered on October 7 who, in the chaos of the war, never received one.
Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir – now so recognizable, so familiar to the country and much of the world – have become symbols of all who were lost. The tribute paid to them was a tribute to all.
Signs with images of broken hearts were everywhere. But broken hearts can heal. A broken spirit is something else entirely. Yarden Bibas, in his eulogy, acknowledged that, entreating his wife to watch over him so that his spirit does not break. “Shiri, please watch over me,” he said.
“Protect me from bad decisions, from harmful things, and from myself. Watch over me so I don’t sink into darkness.”
The funeral procession itself was proof that the nation’s spirit had not broken. If it had, people would not have poured into the streets as they did, rising early in the morning to stand by the roadside to glimpse the passing van. They would not have come carrying flags, thousands and thousands of flags. They would not have sung Hatikvah, their voices choking up.
People who have given up on the state don’t come out by the tens of thousands, flags in hand, singing the national anthem. There is seething anger over October 7 – at the government, the intelligence services, and the army’s top echelon – that will take time and much effort to heal. But it is not anger at the idea of the state itself – and that matters.
Because what did Hamas hope to do on October 7? To break the Israeli spirit. This is what it seeks to do as well with its grotesque theater – parading hostages, withholding bodies, waging psychological warfare. It is all meant to break the country’s spirit, to instill fear, and to make people doubt Israel’s future, to suggest that time is not on its side. That, eventually, the country will be overrun.
But they failed.
A funeral procession like this – something most countries reserve for statesmen, not an “ordinary” family murdered by terrorists – proved that.
Shiri’s sister, Dana Siton, who also lost her parents on October 7, said it best in her eulogy.
“I promise you, as I promised Mom and Dad, that the monsters beyond the fence will not succeed in their mission. They will not defeat us. They will not break us. On the contrary, their mission failed. Because we united. Because we grew stronger. Because we became invincible. They lost."
The heart breaks. But the nation’s spirit does not.