Life is unpredictable

On Sat afternoon we went for a walk because the weather was fine and we enjoy the fresh air.  On the way we witnessed a small drama, a young woman had climbed over the railing and was standing on the edge of the cliff top (about a 120 ft drop).  Two men independently also climbed over and gradually edged towards her, they held onto her from each side and gradually pulled her back from the precipice.  The girl collapsed crying on the grass, then a woman with two children approached and they sat down on the grass next to her and they engaged in an intense conversation with her.  After some time we lost interest and left.  Perhaps her life was saved.

A 17 year old boy answered a knock at the front door of his home in the UK and two men shot him dead.  Apparently they had been hired by the rival of a businessman to kill him, but they went to the wrong address and killed a completely innocent young boy.   Can there be a god that would sanction such a "mistake."   Here is another example, in the US, in order to fight the war on drugs, a special police task force was given extraordinary powers to rapidly enter premises where they suspected drugs were being made/dealt.  A raid was carried out on a house and the police rushed in.  As they did they saw a man enter the corridor ahead of them carrying a gun and they shot him dead.  Unfortunately they had gone to the wrong address, and the man had been in the bathroom using a hair dryer and when the door was smashed in he entered the corridor still holding the hair dryer.  After that their powers were curtailed.  Life is unpredictable.

Of course, there were millions of purely innocent people who were murdered during the Holocaust, including about 1.5 million Jewish children.  What was the meaning of this?  Even today there are thousands of innocent people being massacred in Syria, although I hold no particular sympathy for them, since they would no doubt consider me their enemy and would kill me on sight. 

On Sunday we saw the Israeli movie "Ajami" at the AACI in Netanya where we have an Israeli mini-Film Festival of 4 movies in 4 days.  The movie is mostly in Arabic and Hebrew but has English subtitles.  Ajami is a poor, mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood in Jaffa.  I would not necessarily recommend this movie because it is violent and depressing.  But, it fits perfectly with this theme.  It starts with a young man cleaning a car who is shot down by masked men on a motor bike, and it turns out they shot the wrong boy, because the neighbor had sold him his car, and the gangsters were intending to kill the neighbor's boy because his uncle had killed a member of their clan when he tried to extort money from him.  So it goes, one side killing the other, Arab kids and Jewish kids and drugs and murder.  It reminded me of a series called "The Shield" about the violent streets of south Los Angeles, where blacks and whites are killing each other with abandon.  Life is so precious, but when you are in certain predicaments, it is also unpredictable and short.