Orange in the New Black

How did black become the color of mourning?

Ancient Romans wore a dark toga, called the toga pulla, as a symbol of mourning. This likely influenced later Western mourning practices. Queen Victoria’s prolonged mourning for Prince Albert in 1861 helped solidify black as the standard mourning color in Britain and beyond. Religions viewing black as a color of solemnity and seriousness also contributed to black as the color of mourning.

While Jews don’t have the custom to wear black, Ramban quotes an unknown Midrash that says Moshe told Yehoshua to wear black as a sign of mourning. There are also several Talmudic statements about death and wearing black. So why isn’t wearing black a Jewish mourning custom? Rabbi Yechiel Michel Tucazinsky explains that once non-Jews adopted the practice of wearing black as a sign of mourning, Jews declined to embrace it as a custom. In the end, it remains a sartorial decision.

I believe black being associated with death is about emotion and not color. Black is the absence of light and color, which represent life. When we encounter death, we confront blackness and darkness. The Bible uses the expression “choshech v’tzalmavet – darkness and shadow of death” (Tehillim 107:10, Iyov 3:5). Death envelopes us with feelings of darkness regardless of color.

Today, we feel black because of the color orange. Orange is the color of our mourning with the confirmation of the murder of Ariel and Kfir Bibas and as we await final word on their mother Shiri.

For more than sixteen months, the Bibas family and those orange-haired boys became a symbol of the barbarism and evil of Hamas and their partners. The overwhelming horror of October 7 – over 1,200 murdered and 250 kidnapped – made individual stories necessary to focus our collective grief, outrage, and resolve. There were many powerful individual stories that we followed, and each of them is a profile in courage. At the same time, there was something about a heroic mother protecting her two little, easily recognizable children that captured our imagination. For Hamas to kidnap them – or dare harm them – galvanized us to stand up for them and all the hostages and has enabled so many to pay such a steep price to try and defeat our enemies.

And now, the worst has come to pass.

Seth Mandel wrote how this conflict has confronted us with so much disappointment. The murder of the Bibas boys, however, is especially painful.

“Kfir’s face became a symbol of the conflict because it represented a line that had been crossed and cannot be uncrossed…Kfir became a symbol because he is the answer to every relevant question about this conflict. His case is the war boiled down to its essence. Kfir is the dividing line. In a better world, there’d be no one standing on the wrong side of it.”

The murder of Ariel and Kfir is an emotional – and maybe strategic – turning point. Liel Leibowitz noted:

“The footage of a dead Jewish baby returning home to Israel for burial compels us to tell the truth: The assertion that most, or even many, Gazans are innocents hijacked by their tyrannical leaders is a polite fiction…Like Abraham, our shared Patriarch, we, too, struggled to find the righteous among the wicked…Israel’s neighbors to the south had all the opportunities anyone could reasonably ask for to resist, repent, recalculate course. And at every turn, they returned to the singular idea that gives them life and meaning: Kill the Jews, all of them, gleefully…And the lesson we must learn is simple. It comes down to one word: enough.”

The murder of Ariel and Kfir is more than another display of murderous terror. It is a jarring confrontation with the reality of the pure evil of our enemies and how so much of the rest of the world does nothing. Seeing orange envelopes us in “choshech v’tzalmavet - darkness and shadow of death.” Orange is the new black.

How do we respond? Each person will respond differently. At the same time, Judaism is about action, about going forward.

Orange must be the color of our resolve.

In May of 1957 fedayeen terrorists entered the village of Kfar Chabad in Israel. They made their way to the synagogue of the local agricultural school, where the school's young students were in the midst of the evening prayers, and raked the room with gunfire. Five children and one teacher were killed and another ten children wounded. Despair and dejection pervaded the village. There were some who saw what happened as a sign that their dream of a peaceful life in Israel was premature. The idea of disbanding the community was raised. The village was slowly dying. The Chasidim sent a telegram to the Lubavitcher Rebbe in New York and eagerly awaited a response. Five days later, a response via telegram came from the Rebbe.  It had just three words: “Be’hemshech ha-binyan tinacheimu - By your continued building will you be comforted.”

Israel is continuing to grow and build.

This week, a delegation of American Jewish leaders visited Kibbutz Nir Oz, the home of the Bibas family as well as Oded Lifshitz, 83, who was murdered over a year ago and whose remains were returned this week. They encountered a carpet of green as the wheat and potato fields that were trampled by terrorists on 10/7 have since been replanted and are growing anew. Kibbutz member Nir Metzger explained, “It took us a lot of time to go back to work in these fields. The war was going on… then we weren't allowed to enter these fields. But the minute that they had enough security here, we were already inside, and they allowed us to go into the fields bit by bit.”

Gadi Mozes, 80, one of the leaders of Kibbutz Nir Oz, was kidnapped on October 7. As he was brought back into Israel from Gaza last month, he asked the convoy he was riding in to slow down so he could look at the fields and vowed to rebuild the kibbutz.

We are reeling from seeing orange and feeling “choshech v’tzalmavet.” There is no magic formula for comfort. At the same time, we must try and keep in mind some basic facts. Jews move on. Our enemies hate us. We will fight back. We will keep building. We will win.