I’m writing this almost three decades after the incident happened.

My school years were not easy or smooth sailing. A classmate continuously bullied me and did extremely embarrassing things to me, and somehow, even almost thirty years later, I can still feel the pain as if it was a recent encounter.

For years during those school years and beyond, I tried to be mochel in my heart. I would tell myself that I had forgiven, but as much as I said the words, the hurtful and traumatic feelings kept creeping back. The memories never seemed to fully leave me.

After seminary, I got married fairly quickly, but it was short-lived and ended in a painful divorce. At that point, it had already been about eleven years since the bullying. During the process of growth, healing, and introspection that came with the divorce, I told myself once again that I would forgive that classmate with all my heart. Yet even then, for years afterward, the humiliation I had endured continued to sit quietly in my heart.

Around the time of Covid, I heard that the classmate had gotten divorced. At the time, I felt a sense of “payback,” and I’m not proud to say that my heart didn’t really ache for this person. But shortly after, I began to wonder if perhaps this was because I had never truly been mochel b’lev shaleim, and that is why this family was being hit with such a difficult nisayon. I tried again. And again. Still, every so often, the flashbacks would resurface, reminding me that I had not fully let go.

Baruch Hashem, after being divorced for approximately fifteen years and raising infants on my own, I had the tremendous zechus of getting remarried recently. At that stage of my life, I tried even more deeply to erase those years of bullying from my memory and to fully forgive—not only for the classmate’s sake, but for my own. Yet I still felt as though I was living in the shadow of something that had happened almost three decades earlier.

Then I heard about Charlotte’s accident.

At first, when I heard the family speaking about shalom, I thought the words sounded almost too simple. I wondered how people could possibly put such tremendous pain aside and speak so genuinely about peace.

But after Tisha B’Av, I watched the video about Rabbi and Mrs. Hertzberg forgiving, and something inside me began to shift on a much deeper level.

I watched two families choose forgiveness. I watched them go out of their way not to cause strife. I watched them come together with such warmth and love, and I saw how deeply they cared about preserving the unity of their community.

The way both families united and returned to a sense of normal life after such a devastating accident—simply to avoid tearing a community apart—truly shook me to my core.

And it made me look back at my own story with new eyes.

It is now two weeks after Tisha B’Av, and almost three decades after the bullying that shaped so much of my childhood. And for the first time, I can finally say to Hashem with a completely different heart:

This was not the classmate who made me endure the agony of my miserable school years. This was completely in HKBH’s hands. They were only the messenger.

For almost thirty years, I carried this pain. I tried to forgive. I thought I had forgiven. I prayed to be able to forgive. But today, something feels different.

Today, I can finally let it go.

Not because what happened was insignificant.
Not because it didn’t hurt.
Not because the years of humiliation didn’t matter.

But because I finally understand that the person I blamed for carrying this pain into my life was only a messenger. The entire story was in HKBH’s hands.

And perhaps the greatest gift of all is that Hashem allowed me to see that through Charlotte and her family.

Thank you, Charlotte, for allowing almost thirty years of baggage to finally be lifted from my shoulders.

May your neshama have an aliyah, and may the lesson of the shalom you are bringing to so many people continue to touch hearts and bring healing, forgiveness, and achdus to Klal Yisrael.

May the Beis HaMikdash HaShlishi be built, speedily in our days.