Israeli history, which has seen horrific cases of mothers murdering their children, crossed a new boundary on Sunday evening. A mother and four daughters. The woman who carried and gave birth to these girls, gave them names, nursed them, bathed them, dressed them, read them stories before bedtime, covered them with blankets to keep off the Jerusalem cold, and certainly kissed them good night and spent calm, pleasant nights with them. At least I hope some of her nights with them were like that. A mother and her four daughters, whose lives she extinguished -- the lives she gave them via the umbilical cord, through the pain of childbirth. She gave them life, and then, against all the laws of nature, took it away. With all the pain and fear and feeling of helplessness, the question that is asked automatically is "why-" Why did she do it? What happened to this mother on the last night of Hanukkah, such a beautiful festival of light and miracles? What caused her to lose her grip, her strength, and froze her heart and sent her out of her mind? There really was no need to hear that the mother was receiving treatment for mental illness. This is the first and only possibility suggested by common sense as it tries to take in, to understand what happened. But there is no comfort in it. The opposite. It only prompts more and more questions, mainly the cry of "How was this catastrophe not prevented-" As I am writing this, the names and faces of the victims of this horrific murder have yet to be made public. The rescue team who arrived to save them, only to discover that there was no one to be saved, could only guess their ages -- 11 and a half, 9 and a half, 4, and 11 months -- and declare them dead at the scene, telling the media how difficult the sight was. I can only imagine four girls, flush with life, standing joyfully in front of the lighted menorah. A group of happy, smiling girls, who may have sensed that their mother wasn't well, that she was having a hard time, but in their vitality continued their routine, not imagining that they would soon meet a brutal end in their own home, their own fortress, and that it would be their mother who did it. Their own mother.
