We received a letter from one of our readers that demanded answers — and so we sought them.

Mike Moak, who lives in Guilderland Center not far from the high school, wrote to us because he was concerned by a letter we had published earlier by Guilderland High School student Angelica Sofia Parker.

She wrote in June after high school students had held their fourth annual anti-hate rally in May. Parker wrote with “great sadness and concern” about social-media posts she had seen, claiming the phrase “from the river to the sea” had been written during the rally.

“This phrase calls for the genocide of Jews and was chanted by Hamas during and after the attacks on Oct. 7,” wrote Parker.

She concluded, “I would like to know more details about what took place and how we are going to make all students feel welcomed at the rally (and all school events) moving forward.”

Parker, whose mother, Blanca Gonzalez-Parker, is the newly elected Guilderland School Board president, had written us a year ago as a member of the school track team, concerned that girls, even on hot days, were not allowed to practice without wearing jerseys over their sports bras.

The school board ultimately changed that policy, to allow sports bras with the coach’s permission.

We subsequently received a letter, published in this edition, from Moak who writes in agreement with Parker. He says the phrase “from the river to the sea” is “no less hateful than the oft heard ‘gas the Jews.’ The person who wrote those words has proclaimed his or her support of Hamas, a group of genocidal maniacs who are truly enemies of civilization itself.”

Moak asks, “Did it turn out this incident was merely an online hoax? Did it actually occur? Was anyone held accountable? I am a bit perplexed as to why this newspaper has not addressed this issue. At all. Ms. Parker and the rest of the community deserve some answers.”

Five years ago, we interviewed Moak, a retired pilot, who took on the task of running a marathon in all 50 states — with a time under four hours for each, making him the oldest of an elite group.

Moak completed that quest at the age of 63 in 2019. He said then that his next challenge would be to run a marathon on each continent, where he anticipated tigers in Africa and glaciers in Antarctica.

We learned when we called him this week to talk about his letter to the editor that now, at nearly 68, he has just one continental marathon left and will soon complete that quest in Australia.

In short, we admire both of these letter writers for their grit and pursuit of the truth.

Here is what we found out from the ever-honest Guilderland schools superintendent, Marie Wiles.

One of the exercises at this year’s anti-hate rally, as with earlier rallies, was for participants to chalk affirming messages on the pavement in front of the high school.

Wiles, who attended the rally again this year, said she was pleased to note the student announcing the chalked-message exercise said, “Make sure it’s school appropriate.”

Wiles left when the rally, apparently without incident, was over at about 5:30 p.m. on May 24 but subsequently received a text message from a school board member who had seen and taken a picture of the “from the river to the sea” message.

Wiles said she was back at the school within 10 minutes. “Sure enough; it was written at least two times,” Wiles said.

Wiles took pictures and had the chalked writing washed away.

She and the high school principal, Michael Piscitelli, then reviewed video from the cameras in front of the school. “We wanted to see who had done it so we could talk to those students,” Wiles said.

However, the view of the students who chalked the slogan was blocked by the substantial columns in front of the school.

“We don’t know who wrote it,” said Wiles. “We don’t know their intent.”

Intention matters.

In November, when Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American serving in Congress, was officially rebuked for using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” she defended her use of the phrase as “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate.”

During the House debate of the resolution, Tlaib called for a cease-fire and said, “I can’t believe I have to say this, but Palestinian people are not disposable …. The cries of the Palestinian and Israeli children sound no different to me.”

The official congressional censure, however, says the phrase “is widely recognized as a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel and its people to replace it with a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

The resolution goes on to say Tlaib falsely described the phrase “as ‘an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence’ despite it clearly entailing Israel’s destruction and denial of its fundamental right to exist.”

So which is it?

The Arabic phrase min al-nahr ila al-bahr was spawned in the early 1960s by the Palestinian nationalist movement decades before Hamas existed. It was a call for Palestinians to be able to return to their homeland from which they had been expelled in 1948 with the creation of Israel.

Hamas, however, picked up the phrase and uses it as a call for the annihilation of Israel.

While we condemn Hamas and any movement that would devalue a race or religion — put bluntly: terrorism is bad, killing Jews is wrong — we believe it is still possible to empathize with the suffering of the Palestinian people.

At what point do certain words or symbols take on a meaning that makes them forever different than their original intent?

We see this transformation frequently in our everyday lives.

Take, for example, the phrase, “Let’s go, Brandon.” Those words have become widely recognized code — even appearing on local lawn signs — for insulting the president.

The back story, as described by the Associated Press is that at a NASCAR race in Alabama on Oct. 2, 2021, Brandon Brown, a 28-year-old driver who had won his first Xfinity Series, was being interviewed by a reporter as the crowd behind him was chanting something at first difficult to make out. The reporter suggested they were chanting “Let’s go, Brandon” to cheer the driver. But it became increasingly clear they were saying: “F--- Joe Biden.”

Or take the simple phrase: All lives matter. Of course, each and every life is important to someone — that is the literal meaning of those words.

However, in our modern American culture, those words are routinely used as a way to dismiss the Black lives matter movement.

Symbols can become appropriated too.

Take, for example, the swastika. According to a widely accepted account of its history, as reported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the word swastika comes from the Sanskrit svastika, which means “good fortune” or “well-being.” The hooked-cross motif appears to have first been used in Eurasia, as early as 7,000 years ago and to this day is a sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Odinism, commonly seen on temples or houses in India or Indonesia.

Swastikas have an ancient history in Europe, too, appearing on artifacts from pre-Christian European cultures. “In the beginning of the twentieth century,” the Holocaust Memorial Museum reports, “the swastika was widely used in Europe. It had numerous meanings, the most common being a symbol of good luck and auspiciousness.”

Of course, all that changed when far-right nationalists groups in Europe adopted the swastika to represent a racially “pure” state.

The Nazi Party flag designed by Adolf Hitler — “a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika in the middle,” he wrote in Mein Kampf — became “a potent symbol intended to elicit pride among Aryans,” the Holocaust Memorial Museum states, while also striking “terror into Jews and others deemed enemies of Nazi Germany.”

In Germany today, a public display of the swastika, including on the internet, is against the law.

Of course, in the United States, where we have a First Amendment right to free speech, the swastika can be displayed.

This is where context as well as intent matters.

If we were to see a swastika displayed, say, during a Hindu marriage ceremony, we would not be offended. We would understand it was part of an ancient tradition, signifying the hope of good fortune for the wedding couple.

However, when we saw swastikas displayed during the riot in Charlottesville in 2017 or during the assault on our nation’s capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, we took those swastikas as signs of white supremacy and racist hatred. We condemn that message.

We do not know the intent of the Guilderland students who wrote “from the river to the sea” on the pavement in front of their school on May 24. 

About a month after the horrific Oct. 7 terrorist attack that Hamas perpetrated on Israel, Wiles had told us, “I know we have families in our school who are Jewish and who feel intensely the trauma of what happened … and don’t feel safe maybe here or anywhere at this point. We also have many, many families who have strong ties and family members who live in Gaza. We have children who have lost multiple members of their families that we know about.”

Perhaps the students who chalked the May 24 messages will read this and come forward to explain their intentions; we urge them to do so.

While we don’t know their intent, we do know the context; it was during an anti-hate rally.

The theme of this year’s rally was “Diversity Is Our Strength.” To build that strength, not just in our schools but in our world at large, we need to understand and be sensitive to the history and heritage of others living in these United States.

We are pleased that Wiles said she and Derek Westbrook, the school district’s director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, had met on June 27 with two local rabbis and the head of the Jewish Federation of  Northeastern New York to discuss “how do we make our students or staff aware of what that expression means; they offered ideas and resources,” she said.

In the fall of 2021, when a couple of students wore blackface, purportedly following a “black out” theme where everyone wore black in the cheering section during a Guilderland High School football game, the school principal, Piscitelli, immediately sent out a letter to inform parents of the incident. Widespread media coverage followed.

A school assembly was held to educate students on the harm caused by racial slurs and stereotypes. While students painting their faces white for a “white out” theme would cause no problem, blackface has a long and ugly history in the United States. White people spread racial stereotypes in the 19th and early 20th centuries as they painted their faces black to perform as “darkies” in minstrel shows.

Wiles said this week, as she plans ahead for the next school year, she is not sure a schoolwide assembly is the best way to educate students. The students who are already concerned pay attention at such assemblies, she said, while others who need to be educated can tune out.

She suggested perhaps engaging students in “civil conversation” on the meaning of the phrase “from the river to the sea.”

“There are all kinds of expressions and symbols that mean things,” said Wiles. “I’m not sure even adults know. We need to create spaces for students to better understand what words mean and how they impact others.”

She called this “a life’s work.” And so it is. It is work in which each of us should take part.

Wiles’s commencement speech in June centered on blind spots. She started out discussing literal blind spots as she taught her newly licensed son to drive, and then moved on to metaphoric blind spots.

“Teaching driving has its challenges …,” Wiles told the graduates, “dredging up a conscious awareness of what has largely become automatic.”

She went on, “Just as all cars have blind spots, so do all people — every single one of us,” said Wiles. These blind spots, she said, preclude us from understanding certain people and points of view.

This week, in talking to us, and also last month in her speech to the graduates, Wiles put hope in “civil conversations.”

English teacher Mitchell Hahn, she said, guides students to discuss controversial topics — not to win, as in a debate, but rather to listen and learn.

The point, Wiles said, is not to persuade but rather “to peer into the blind spot of our differences to gain a new perspective.”

We are grateful to Angelica Sofia Parker and Mike Moak for forcing us to do just that.

We would posit one of the topics for a civil conversation should be what “from the river to the sea” means to a Palestinian — not to a Hamas terrorist but to someone whose family was displaced from their homeland — and what that phrase means to a Jew.

Both of those peoples have an ancient claim to the same land, which is profoundly in need of a modern solution.

“We’re living in a period of time with a lot of blind spots,” Wiles told us this week. “Sometimes we choose not to look — and we need to.”

We need to delve deep and bring to conscious awareness the meaning of the words we use, which all too often are automatic responses that can provoke rather than enlighten.