Doing Good versus Doing Nothing

We spent one entire day on resistance. When I teach resistance, the most commonly known example that my kids have heard of is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And I do spend a day of class discussing that. However, resistance is so much more than armed resistance, than a fight against the perpetrators with sticks and knives and guns. There was a great quote that I heard in our studies on that day and it was, "Resistance doesn't have to be with a gun and a bullet. Sometimes, the easiest resistance is with a gun and a bullet."

I think about Ghandi, about Martin Luther King, Jr., about so many throughout history who have proven that sometimes the harder fight (and more effective one) takes the path of nonviolent resistance. Resistance in the Holocaust took on many forms other than that of partisan fighters... it was cultural, it was spiritual.

The mother who gave her piece of bread to her starving child... the artists who drew and painted with anything they could find on scraps of paper, rocks, walls, and fabric... the teenagers who scribbled poetry and journal entries on pieces of trash... the doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto who knew they were starving and so decided to do studies on themselves as they starved to death, leaving behind a study called Hunger and Disease in the Warsaw Ghetto: Non Omnis Moriar ("I Shall Not Wholly Die"), which was found after the Holocaust and used in medical schools for years afterward... the exams given to students in clandestine schools in the Lodz Ghetto because "God forbid we come to the end of this experience and have a generation of idiots"... the men who wore hats over their kipas so that, in saluting the Nazis, they didn't have to lift their kipa off their head... the people in the camps who continued to practice their faith, even fasting in a place where daily life looked like fasting...

The beauty of educating about this type of resistance is that it enables me to teach my students that being a hero doesn't always look the same. Sometimes it's being the only person in a class who tells a teacher when there is a derogatory group message or a twitter ridicule. Sometimes it's making a choice to befriend everyone, no matter what one's social group has to say about it. Sometimes it's speaking up for your faith or your race or your nationality.

It also enlarges the view of the heroic for all of us. In all of our lives, someone (or many someone's) are watching. They are watching our Christians responded to the Supreme Court ruling on homosexual marriage, how Southerners responded to the Confederate flag question, how Americans responded to domestic terror. My students watched my response to all of those things, and many more, on social media. My daughters watch my response to the homeless man in the grass beside Walmart. I always use a piece with my students when I teach personal responsibility called "Always Go to the Funeral". It has a few lines in it that are so powerful to me:

"In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing."