The Evil of Indifference to Evil

I have been reading – very slowly – Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Prophets.  I just came across a passage in his chapter on divine anger that I have not been able to get out of my head.  Heschel writes:

There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous. A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an exception becoming the rule and being in turn accepted.

…

God is not indifferent to evil! He is always concerned, He is personally affected by what man does to man. He is a God of pathos. This is one of the meanings of the anger of God: the end of indifference!

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