○  the perils of indifference  ○

as worse than to be punished by him. better an unjust god than an indifferent one. for us to be ignored by god was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of his anger. man can live far from god -- not outside god. god is wherever we are. even in suffering? even in suffering.

in a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. anger can at times be creative. one writes a great poem, a great symphony. one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. but indifference is never creative. even hatred at times may elicit a response. you fight it. you denounce it. you disarm it.

indifference elicits no response. indifference is not a response. indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. and, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. the political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. and in denying their humanity, we betray our own.

indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.

and this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century's wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.

in the place that i come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. during the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps -- and i'm glad that mrs. clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the days of remembrance -- but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. all of us did.

and our only miserable consolation was that we believed that auschwitz and treblinka were closely guarded

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