“I tried to shake him awake, but there was nothing. The child was stiff, blue, dark blue in color from the cold.”
I read today in the New York Times of how Jumaa al-Batran, three weeks old, died of hypothermia overnight in his parents’ tent; his twin brother, Ali, who was taken for dead, is fighting for his life in the NICU at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza. Even if he does recover, his doctor warned of possible damage to his brain or other organs, and noted the tragic fact that, if he recovers, he will be sent back to the very same conditions that threatened his life.
On the Feast of the Holy Innocents, I read of the seventy refugees that are missing and presumed drowned after a migrant boat sank off the coast of Morocco. These seventy dead added to the over ten thousand drowned this year trying to reach Spain – that does not count the thousands who died en route to Greece, to Italy, to Türkiye… and that speaks to the Mediterranean alone. Such things never rise to the mainstream headlines. We have become numb to reports of children dying as migrants or refugees, or of want and starvation, or of preventable disease, such as the malnourished vulnerable succumbing in numbers to respiratory malaria in DRC. But dying of cold? On the Mediterranean? Who has heard of such things in the modern world? I hate the cold, with a passion; that children should have to endure it as a way of life is grievous. For these families of war, it is but one more hardly bearable suffering, if perhaps even a lesser one, affliction heaped upon trauma.
Given that we are in the Octave of the Divine Infancy, just days after Holy Innocents, might it not be time to acknowledge the abandonment of the smallest and weakest of our brothers and sisters? Those described above are birthed and viable members of the human community, about whom absolutely no one maintains any ambiguity. Who has ever heard of a baby being taken hostage, like one-year-old Kfir Bibas who, with his five-year-old brother Ariel, is still held captive in the tunnels under Gaza? What of Khaled Alrahal, a three-year-old Syrian boy with leukemia trapped in a migrant camp in Jordan as of 2023?—his father, hoping to bring the family to Germany (which has a family reunification policy) so his son could seek a bone marrow transplant, drowned in the sinking of another migrant ship. Their circumstances witness against us.
If our Holy Father insists that we go to the margins, then we – I, counted among the urban poor in America, with my heated car seat, warm home, electric blanket, innumerable cups of hot coffee per day, and fur-lined moccasins on order from Canada – can go to those margins at least in our thoughts, with some cognizance, some remembrance of the departed and the bereaved. It is reported that many of Gaza’s children, who are effectively without shelter, are still wearing their summer clothes. Am I called to fast from some particular comfort in solidarity?—yes, perhaps, but with something that amounts to no more than a feeble token offering. Am I called to speak out for justice?—I am no activist, but I have confidence in the great good will of all who read here; the reach of my voice, though limited, extends to people of virtue and compassion.
When I assist in teaching ethics at a secular college, there can be no religious recourse when students ask the hard questions, as they do. Responses bearing no universal human resonance are useless to such occasions. There is, however, a thought I could share with all, which brings me hope: The human family is interconnected; thus, any of us can, by a single act united in spirit with these pure and suffering souls, become part of the goodness that it is their mission as innocents to hold forth in the world.
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