The day the remaining living hostages were released in October, our family gathered around the screen. The videos came slowly, one by one—faces weary and tearful, bodies frail, hands reaching for light. My older children leaned in close, trying to make sense of what they were seeing. The baby, though too young to understand, was drawn in too, eyes fixed on the flickering images, her small body still with attention. For a long moment, no one spoke. Then my son asked quietly, “Did the babies come home too?”
The question lingered in the air. It held all the hope and heartbreak of that day—the innocence of childhood pressed against the unbearable truth of a world that sometimes fractures it. I didn’t know how to answer. How could I explain that some had, and some hadn’t? That sometimes the world is too cruel to fit inside a parent’s promise that everything will be okay?
I paused before answering. The silence between us felt sacred—a space wide enough to hold both our sorrow and our hope.
In almost two decades of sitting with children and families through their hardest moments, I’ve learned that a simple question is never just a question. It carries layers—fear, longing, confusion, love—all folded into a few trembling words. When a child asks, “Why do people die?” or “Why are people mean?” or “Where is God when people hurt?” they are not asking for information. They are asking for reassurance that the world still holds meaning, that they are safe within it, and that someone they trust will walk beside them while they search for understanding.
Sometimes a question carries two voices: the child’s and our own. When a young person looks to us for answers, they awaken something ancient in us yearning for comfort or clarity: our own unresolved fears, our own early encounters with loss, our own need to make sense of a world that is both breathtaking and broken.
Adults often rush to answer quickly, to reassure our children that goodness wins and that justice always comes. Yet beneath that urge often lies our own fear of sitting with what cannot be neatly explained. Silence can feel unbearable. So we fill it with words meant to soothe us as much as them.
When we meet a child’s question with reverence instead of resolution, we move from instructing to accompanying. We might say, “That’s a really big question. I wonder about that too.” Or, “Let’s hold that together.” Those words don’t close the question; they keep it alive.
Children’s raw, unfiltered curiosity is not an obstacle to faith. It is the soil from which love, faith, and courage can grow. The Jewish tradition understands this deeply. Our story begins with questions: Abraham asking, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?” Moses asking, “Why have You brought trouble on this people?” And the Four Questions of the Passover Seder, where children are invited to ask, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Each question is honored as sacred, a doorway into learning and connection. The Talmud—a vast, centuries-old compendium of Jewish discussion and debate—is built entirely on questions that never stop unfolding.
In my work, I’ve seen how children’s questions are doorways into empathy and moral awakening. A second grader once asked me, “If Dr. King was so good, why did someone kill him?” Another, while creating felt art about a Torah story, wondered, “If God said not to kill, why are there wars in the Torah?” These are not moments to correct but to connect, to help them hold complexity without losing hope.
Sitting with those questions can feel daunting. Yet when we help children stay in that space, we are giving them the chance for moral development. We help children understand that the world contains both beauty and pain, and that being human means learning to live with both. We teach them that faith is the quiet strength to stay in relationship with the questions themselves.
Responding this way gives us tools for our own lives, too. Slowing down, listening deeply, and naming what is hard can turn even the most painful conversations into acts of connection. These small practices are in fact a form of spiritual courage.
That day, when my son asked about the babies, I told him the truth. Some had come home alive and others hadn’t. He looked at me and said softly, “That’s so sad.” I said, “Yes. It is.” We sat together, holding the sadness and allowing it to be. No attempt to make it smaller. Just presence, quiet and real.
In that stillness, I saw what children so often teach us: that even sorrow can open a path toward tenderness. When we resist the urge to rush toward comfort, we teach them that it is possible to face what is hard and still believe in what is good.
May we learn to meet our children’s questions with tenderness and courage, holding their wonder as the sacred invitation it truly is.