“So much death,” laments King Theoden in Tolkien’s “The Two Towers.” The question he asks next is one that I too struggle to answer, “What can men do against such reckless hate?” Because it’s just not possible to “delete messages” for every terrible thing the world contains.

Sometimes I think about John Lennon’s sweet song “Across the Universe” and its refrain, “Nothing’s going to change my world.” It’s a strangely transcendent lyric, but when I hear it now, the words sometimes make me sad, given that Lennon’s world was indeed changed by a deranged young man with a .38 Special.

Often that’s been my first response to hate — to obstinately declare that my sense of the world cannot be changed, even by violence. Sometimes, this means insulating myself from obscenities, as when I deleted that racist voice mail. That can be a good strategy for self-care.

Other times, I fear it means putting my head in the sand, denying the very reality of the terrible things that hatred has brought about.

An even worse response — which I’m also guilty of — is to answer hate with hate. On Twitter, for example, I’m hardly generous, especially when it comes to responding to people who think it’s clever to diminish my humanity. Am I embarrassed by some of the things I’ve tweeted — and written — in the heat of the moment? Yes.

Of course, fighting back is only natural when people attack you. A better response would be to try to open hearts. There are many ways of going about this, including getting involved in communities that seek to illuminate the human spirit, communities like Barnard.

Another thing we can do is to gather together in defiance of the darkness. On Sunday, tens of thousands of New Yorkers did just that, at a rally against anti-Semitism. Events such as these can bring about the very thing Tessa Majors tried to do in her short life — the tethering of one soul to another.