“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.” (Luke 10:30–33)

There was once a man outside of Union Station in Washington, DC. Homeless, unwell, and convulsing. Apparently overdosing. I walked by and kept walking. I was consumed with a desire to be home after a long day in the office. I thought, “Surely some other person will stop, someone more qualified to help.”

I was uncomfortably reminded of my lack of action in a conversation with a friend about whether she should resign from her government job. We were discussing ethical and theological questions about how to respond to events that appeared to be outside of our control, especially when paralysis feels inevitable. We didn’t want to settle for paralysis – we wanted to be the kind of people who respond in the face of human need with moral courage even if it comes at a cost.

In our discussion, I shared what I had learned in an undergraduate humanities course I took ten years ago. The course was titled “Against Indifference.” More than any other college course, it has surfaced in my mind over the years since because of the way it seeped deep down, unnerving my conscience. The lesson that has stuck like a splinter in my thumb is that how we respond to the needs of our neighbor in the mundane is the greatest predictor of how we will respond in a time of crisis. Little acts of care are what build our capacity for heroic acts.

I compare the lesson to a splinter because since taking that course I notice when I have responded indifferently or callously to another human being. My conscience irritates with that one word – indifference – a splinter that cannot be removed with tweezers. I walked by the homeless man, and with each step I took toward home, my mind hissed that word – indifference. Next time, I told myself.

The course was taught by Carole Lambert, an English professor at Azusa Pacific University who studied under Elie Wiesel at Boston University in the 1990s. Elie Wiesel was a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and recipient of the Noble Peace Prize in 1986. Through writing, speaking, and teaching, Wiesel dedicated his life to combatting “indifference, intolerance, and injustice.” The undergraduate course I took was an in-depth study of Wiesel’s conviction – developed from his personal experience – that the opposite of love is indifference, not hatred. We looked for examples of indifference in literature ranging from Wiesel’s book The Town Beyond the Wall to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illych, and short stories by Gabriel García Márquez. Lambert also drew on her expertise in Holocaust studies, providing historical examples from World War II of individuals such as the French couple Magda and André Trocmé, who courageously helped save three thousand Jewish refugees, in comparison to those who passively accepted the Nazification of their society.

Literature and history are limited in their ability to help us decipher today’s challenges. Today’s conditions are different from those the Trocmés faced. We live with a different set of fears and injustices. Still, Wiesel’s ideas about indifference are evergreen: we must remain attentive to the ways we show concern and respond to the needs of our neighbor so that we will have the moral muscles to do so when the stakes are higher – when the stakes are life or death.

That said, the Holocaust asks us important questions about ourselves. My human nature and my moral outrage about the Holocaust make it easy for me to imagine that I would have responded courageously to protect the lives of innocent Jews. However, as Lambert’s book Against Indifference cites, only 0.5 percent of the population risked their lives to help save Jews, leaving 99.5 percent of the population in the categories of bystander or oppressor, or somewhere in between. Given those numbers, would I really have risked my own life or the lives of my family members to protect the life of a stranger? What made the 0.5 percent distinct? Why did they have the moral courage to risk everything to save their Jewish neighbors?

I sat down with Lambert recently to discuss her course and her book. From that conversation, a few themes emerged that might be useful to people having conversations like the one my friends and I had a year ago, as we continue to discern how we want to show up in our relationships, neighborhoods, jobs, and the world at large.

We the Indifferent

Lambert, quoting scholars W. Brad Johnson and Charles R. Ridley, offers this definition of indifference: “a dulled, insensitive, and uncaring disposition toward people,” or, in other terms, an absence of compassion. She specifies that indifference falls on a spectrum of inaction, ranging from those who don’t care to those who appear as if they don’t care because they have not acted, including those who are emotionally distraught but too paralyzed to act.

To further illustrate the concept of indifference, in our first class Lambert drew a triangle on the whiteboard and labeled the corners “oppressor,” “bystander,” and “victim.” She explained the relationship between the three corners as one of movement. When bystanders choose to act for the benefit of the victim, they move closer to the victim. If the bystanders do nothing, they move closer to the oppressor. The critical takeaway, Lambert says, is that “paradoxically, indifferent bystanders participate actively when they do nothing to stop genocide, even though they may have the illusion of not being involved in it.”

In her book, Lambert provides Elie Wiesel’s reflections from the point of view of the victim. He writes, “What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.” The outcome for the victims is the same – they die in front of the violent persecutor, and they die in front of the silent bystander. The injury from the silence of the bystanders is bitingly felt because they had the ability to do something and didn’t.

People act indifferently for innumerable reasons – not all of them bad, and many quite easily understood. Not wanting to jeopardize the safety of your family is an understandable instinct. The most common reasons found, however, for why a supermajority of people did not attempt to protect their Jewish neighbors are quite disappointing. Drawing on research reported by Victoria J. Barnett in Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust, Lambert explains that one inhibitor of action is the bystander effect, a term in psychology that describes how people will hide behind the collective, assuming they have no responsibility because they are not the ones directly harming the victim. Another cause is paralysis. When people feel powerless and events appear inevitable, the gravity of the situation freezes people into inaction. A third reason, Barnett writes, is that “most people are far more preoccupied with maintaining the normal rhythms of their lives than with the wish to become involved – perhaps at some risk – to alleviate the suffering of others.” Passive acceptance of the blood-and-soil nationalism of the Nazi Party as the new “normal” allowed bystanders to maintain a simulation of their daily, mundane routine.

We are trapped in the minutiae of our own lives. We don’t want uncomfortable inconveniences to alter our routines. That is, until we are the ones in need of assistance. Lambert writes:

Indifference is cyclical: many persons are so caught up in their own issues and challenges in life that they demonstrate peripheral, minimal concern for the suffering of others until some agony envelops them too. Then they want others, who are still among the indifferent, to help them, and they are disturbed when their needs and concerns are ignored, no help forthcoming. This destructive, dehumanizing cycle quietly continues unless it is somehow interrupted.

The banal reasons why we passively slide into inaction make me ask: How can I personally avoid becoming part of the silent majority? How can I prepare myself today to choose action and love of my neighbor, no matter the scenario or level of risk?

Overcoming Indifference

From my conversation with Lambert, I’ve identified several qualities make action to assist one’s neighbor more likely.

The first is empathy, the ability to empathize with the experience of the other person and then compassionately act. While this seems obvious – and obviously consistent with Christian teachings to exhibit fruits of the spirit such as love, kindness, goodness, and gentleness – there has been discourse among professing Christians about the “weakness” and “toxic” display of empathy. Those making such arguments believe the political stakes are too high. They say empathy, compassion, and kindness are instruments for political losers, not political winners. However, the Bible clearly says Christians ought to display the fruits of the spirit regardless of their political or social power or lack thereof. Christianity is, after all, a religion born out of persecution and modeled after Jesus Christ, who exhorts us to love our neighbors and to love our enemies.

Another commonality among heroic actors during the Holocaust is that they had already determined, long before the war, who they viewed as their neighbor. Clarity around the imago Dei, believing everyone is made in the image of God, compelled them to treat all people with dignity. They established these values before the crisis unfolded, and as Barnett writes, this gave them the “courage to respond immediately” when the policies of the Nazis came into direct conflict with those values. The rescuers were also already in the habit of focusing on the similarities they shared with their neighbors, rather than what divided them. “While most people saw Jews as pariahs, rescuers saw them as human beings,” as Lambert quotes Eva Fogelman’s research in Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust.

This gives me pause: How do I understand who my neighbors are and how do I relate to them? Political polarization in the United States has significantly narrowed our understanding of neighbor. In 2024, one poll found that nearly half of the US electorate thinks members of the opposing party are “downright evil.” Fear and anxiety about the future have led people to focus on dissimilarities between left and right, rural and urban, immigrant and citizen, religious and secular. It will take extra effort to retrain our moral imagination on who we consider as our neighbor – and we must do so before a crisis arises. Who we consider as our neighbor today will predict how we will respond tomorrow if tensions spill into further violent action.

The other quality the rescuers shared is action, and specifically, action done with others. Lambert’s book describes how a “rescuer self” develops when a decision is made to respond to injustice. It is quick and guttural. Nearly instantaneously, the person moves through the sequence of recognizing a need, taking responsibility, deciding to respond, and then acting. Scholars have found that during the Holocaust, when the risk was exceptionally high, “those who contributed to the survival of Jews … agree that very few could work alone without a functioning network offering practical support and without the ongoing absolutely necessary emotional support of others who affirmed that one’s values, in face of the evil ‘norm,’ were correct.” It is not enough to be an individual hero. We need collective support to lower the barrier to helping our neighbors. We are meant to demonstrate our love of neighbor together in community – as the church.

Lambert frequently reminded us in class that those who acted courageously did not see themselves as heroes. Reportedly, they often rejected the label of hero and remarked that they were simply doing what was required of them in the moment. They were the kind of people who did not draw lines between mundane and extraordinary circumstances – they were not going to stand around and wait for some threshold of crisis to be crossed.

Because of the familiarity of the Good Samaritan story, I easily envision myself in the role of the Samaritan. Of course I would have helped a man visibly bleeding on the street. But as we have seen in the Holocaust, the statistical odds are slim that I would actually have been a rescuer; it’s more likely I would have been one of 199 who passed by before someone stopped.

Heroic powers will not magically fall upon us at the right time. The exercise of moral muscles in the mundane is what will predict whether we will act with courage today, tomorrow, or in any future era of grave social need.

There is a homeless man lying on the sidewalk outside of Union Station in Washington, DC. Next time, I tell myself, I will act and not be ashamed.