I would like to take a moment of your time to discuss the contents of this paragraph and thus virtually all versions of this genre of pargraph that have existed and will continue to self-generate into the forseeable future:

You will note that the framing of the beginning of this sentence with “The reality…” has already established the following sentiments to be defensive in nature, bolstered by the easy conflation of a community with the actions of specific people in a specific time.

Properly acknowledging and investigating the distance between us, the Jewish community, and the actions of, specifically, R. Abraham Joshua Heschel and the students of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, is important; its observation being an essentially Jewish act.

The presence of the Four Children in the Peysekh Hagode enshrines the observance of the distance between the revolutionary and miraculous events of the Exodus narrative and later generations, who inquire after it (or don’t) from a safe remove.

The harshest reckoning in this observance is the admonishment from the parent to the “wicked” child for absenting themselves from the obligations the Peysekh ritual represents: “If he had been there, he would *not* have been saved.”

*If* he had been there. Heschel was there, as were the Jewish students of Freedom Summer. The entire Jewish community wasn’t necessarily there; it can be argued that these individuals were actively countering attitudes of considerable portions of the Jewish community at the time.

L’koved these brave Jewish individuals and others who continue their work today, I invite you to resist the defensive instrumentalization of their deeds in the ongoing editorial rhetorics of collective black indebtedness to a monolithic Jewish community.

As individuals in community we must strive to continue the work of R. Abraham Joshua Heschel and the students of the Mississippi Freedom Summer.

They’ve blessed us unto the thousandth generation; don’t we have an obligation to the generation after that?