On Thursday, May 7, a verdict was issued in the case of the man who threw two fire bombs, out of an arsenal of 18, into a group of people assembled in front of the Boulder County Courthouse. They were assumed to be, and most were, Jews. One person was fatally burned, many others were injured, some with severe burns.

The prosecution presented a case that did not leave space for a viable defense strategy. The defendant pleaded guilty to all charges, more than 100 of them. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and 2,128 years thereafter — eternity, practically speaking. The symbolism is unmistakable.

The victims’ statements, mine among them, told of lives changed after the attack. Life is not the same as before, was the ubiquitous testimony. Apprehension that subsumed a sense of safety. Hyper-vigilance. Insecurity about the future. Depression, panic, flashbacks, nightmares. A profound sense of sorrow over the loss of Karen Diamond, whose name was mentioned by many. It was still a time for grief.

The attack itself brought out the best and the worst in our community. There were those who rushed into the fire with water, running back and forth, not knowing what they were running into or if the danger had passed, without any training, without any equipment.

There were those who, barely two months later, hounded us on our weekly Sunday walk, with screams, accusations, threats. Among them was a candidate for our City Council, and a self-admitted hater of everything. There were many, very many, who provided support and sustenance. There were those for whom our trauma and bewilderment became an opportunity to advance personal goals and ambitions at the expense of the most vulnerable among us.

Nearly a year has passed since the attack. The justice system provided justice in legal terms. The emotional tendency now is to go back to life as it had been before, both in our personal lives, as well as communal ones, in all the small and large communities we are part of. Some normality — the “before” state — does need to be recovered. Yet, I posit, life cannot be and must not be the same as before. “Cannot” has a physiological component; its effect will vary from person to person. “Must not” implies a moral prerogative, imperative on all of us.

We did not choose this. It landed in our laps. Now it is ours — to experience, to process, to act responsibly. Not because we, in this town and this county, are guilty of giving too much ground to antisemitic incitement, which we did and still do. One can no longer claim to be oblivious of the fact that the intensity of so-termed “anti-Zionist” and “anti-Israel” speech and activity augers physical violence against Jews, anywhere and everywhere.

Even if the one condemned to eternity in prison did not come from among us, this incident, where Jews were set on fire in an open space, happened here, in our town, in our county, in a place where we take children to play. The responsibility that history and fate gave us must not be wasted.

Boulder must come to a reckoning over its normalization of anti-Jewish speech and acts, masquerading as political acts, right to free speech, etc. None of our statutes guaranteeing free speech releases us from the moral responsibility for the consequences of our speech.

Here, and in many other places, these consequences have been deadly. What the law cannot prohibit, we, the people, can make socially unacceptable. We have done it before. Many words are no longer spoken. We have learned not to use our speech to denigrate, demean, dehumanize entire groups of people, and we are better for it. We must do it again. This time, for Jews. It is the right thing to do, and it is the just thing to do.

On a beautiful summer day, I came face to face with the imminence of being incinerated in the middle of Boulder’s city plaza. It was unreal in its monstrosity, its unlikelihood, in the shock it produced.

I was left not only with a profound sense of vulnerability but also a release from the inner boundaries that inhibited my speech and my actions to those acceptable in our carefully ordered society. This is not the time to stay within our proscribed lines. It is a time when courage is necessary for life to go on.

Rachelle Halpern lives in Boulder.