Schindler's List is a movie one doesn't forget. One of the most horrible scenes is that of the commandant who, for his own amusement and in order to watch the prisoners scatter, uses a rifle to shoot some of the Jews in the courtyard of the prison camp.

This one vignette graphically portrays the opposite of the message the prophet Isaiah was communicating in the portion of his writings we are looking at now, chapter 42, verses 1-9. "A bruised reed he will not break." All of us surely shudder and shrink from the unthinkable carnage and lack of any semblance of human decency depicted in that scene from the film, so different from protecting even a bruised reed in the wind. What is so troubling is that our minds and emotions have adjusted themselves only too easily to scenes only too similar t…