I will offer very little of it, because my only purpose on making the demand is to steer you to the words of someone else.
His name is Roger Cohen. For years he wrote for the International Herald Tribune. Now from time to time his work, often powerful, appears in the New York Times.
As does the piece I want you to read, Dreaming of Mandela.
Cohen is white, Jewish, and grew up in South Africa.
This is an amazing piece. For example, writing about his grandfather whom he has introduced in the previous paragraph, Cohen offers a paragraph about him, and then a rejoinder:
At picnics on Table Mountain, a beret on his head, socks pulled up almost to his knee, Laurie would plunge a knife into the pale green watermelons, making a series of incisions before, with a flourish, allowing the succulent fruit to fall open in oozing red bloom. We feasted and left a trail of eggshells and bitten-out watermelon rind.
And on Robben Island, without watch or clock, Mandela maps time on the wall of his cell.
He follow that structure throughout his piece - several longer paragraphs about South Africa and a short one about Mandela.
His conclusion is similarly shaped - he notes that he has been dreaming, that Mandela
broke the cycle of conflict by placing the future above the past, humanity above vengeance.
He places Mandela in the tradition of what Jewish ethics demands.
And then he offers this simple conclusion:
The truth is we did not deserve him. We could not even imagine him. But, as I learned young in South Africa, the human spirit can avert even inevitable catastrophe.
Perhaps you know what I am so foolish to demand that you read the entire piece?