Trolley Square and death of the innocents

By now, the events at Trolley Square have been played and replayed a thousand times in the media and in our minds. People keep trying to make sense of it all. We've seen the tragedy through political eyes, religious eyes, the eyes of business and the eyes of those involved.

Still the fear remains that perhaps there's no sense to be made.

And the question that haunts people is the same that has haunted humanity for centuries — back to the era of King Herod and his slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem. It is this: How can the human heart ever process — let alone understand — the slaughter of innocent souls?

Julia Hartwig, a Polish poet, made a run at explaining such things. In her poem about the wholesale massacre in Bethlehem she writes, "Violent horror soon gave way to the still, more awful numbness of despair."

In his book "When Bad Things Happen to Good People," Rabbi Harold Kushner writes:

"To grab a gun and shoot at innocent people is irrational, unreasonable behavior, but I can understand it. What I cannot understand is why 'Mrs. Smith' should be walking on that street at that moment while 'Mrs. Brown' chooses to step into a shop on a whim and saves her life. ... The lives of dozens of people will be affected by such trivial, unplanned decisions."

Kushner goes on to say that "some people will find the hand of God behind everything that happens," but he himself asks, "Is there always a reason? Or do some things just happen at random, for no cause?"

He says he believes things do often happen at random. We cannot control events, we can only control our reaction to them. And the best response is to have faith that even terrible things can have meaning — if we are wise enough and willing to give them a meaning. And "hope" is our one avenue through. He then quotes the lines spoken by Job's wife in a play by Archibald MacLeish:

The candles in churches are out.

The stars have gone out in the sky.

Blow on the coal of the heart,

And we'll see, by and by ...

And that takes me back to Julia Hartwig's poem. At the end of the poem she talks of Joseph and Mary "carrying the world's hope to a safer place." As Herod was slaughtering the innocents, she says, the flowers still bloomed, the birds sang and young lovers kissed. Her point is that the one thing more powerful than tragedy is hope.