There is a major difference between horror and terror. Terror takes up all consciousness; there is no space for any thought or feeling except the so-called “fight or flight” syndrome we’ve heard about and, at least to some extent, personally experienced. It’s stark fear—exponential. It’s what the victims of 9/11 felt, those who died, and those who survived—those we saw on television, running with smoke and debris chasing them as the towers fell. You can’t turn and fight fire and smoke and debris, so you flee. But terror is not what we experienced. Terror is reserved for victims. Some of us may have felt “terrorized” but we weren’t. We had distance. We didn’t experience terror; we experienced horror. And as those who experience terror are victims, those who experience horror are witnesses.

The hearts and minds of witnesses are not filled with fight or flight. There is room—room for thought, for attempts to comprehend, and most of all—for attempts to analyze causes. In fact, once we comprehend what is really happening, our first intellectual reflex is to do just that—explain it to ourselves. That’s when the hearts of many are revealed.

On the evening of 9/11, I watched Peter Jennings talking to a group of children. He said he was concerned about the reaction of children in general, and so he wanted to have this little session with a group of them. He asked them why they thought this had happened. (I remember thinking that his question revealed more about him than it did about the children.) Each of them responded with “they hate us” or something similar, until he reached a girl who appeared to be a little older than the others and who said she thought we must have done something terrible to them. That seemed to be the answer he was looking for; he asked her to elaborate, and she did. Nobody, she said, would do something like this without just cause.

A friend I once had in Florida told me that her father, a survivor of the Holocaust, always said that European Jews had become too uncaring of others, too insulated, and that’s why the Holocaust happened. He explained it to himself.

Witnesses of horror need explanations. The kind of explanation we accept reveals things about us, not about the horror.

A Baptist man I know recently had extensive surgery for a cancer. His life is changed, he said, because he’s had “a wake-up call” from the Lord—he intends to be a better Christian. A woman who is a non-believing secularist had a similar experience and also called it “a wake-up call”—to be more loving toward her family.

We must explain horror. And when we do, we see ourselves in the explanations we give ourselves. The crucifixion had only one Victim; all the rest were witnesses. It’s in the explanations they gave themselves for the horror of deicide that revealed their hearts: He deserved it—there was “just cause”; he’d been too uncaring of others; he had not been a good enough Jew; he’d been too unloving…

Really?