I just want you to know that your story is so incredibly moving and powerful. You didn’t have to share it. You didn’t have to go public, Binny didn’t have to show his face, you didn’t have to say anything. You all could have stayed nameless and faceless and no one would have given it a second thought. But you chose to speak, you chose to share, and it had such a massive impact on me – and clearly, thousands of others. I cried through the entire video, and I’ve watched it multiple times since that first time and have just cried and cried. I felt the impact in my bones. Your words really hit deep.
I don’t have a big dramatic story to share. Baruch Hashem I’ve never been involved in machlokes or fighting and I hope to never be, however people have hurt me in the past and I continue to struggle to forgive them. Charlotte’s story has given me a lot of thought and has helped me work through a lot of pain.
The biggest thing for me though is that I work in an office that serves many frum people, and I struggle with shmiras halashon. It’s hard to work in a high pressure job that involves caring for people with many different, and sometimes challenging, personalities. It can wear me down and I find myself talking negatively about a lot of people. I want you to know that a few days after watching the Letting Go video, I was in a situation where I was about to say a pretty nasty thing about a client to the coworker sitting next to me. But I remembered Charlotte. I remembered you. And I clamped my mouth shut. And in that moment I davened that it should be a zchus for Charlotte, a zchus for Klal Yisrael, and a personal zchus for me as I’m waiting for a yeshua in a certain area. That was all to your credit.
And another small act – I smiled at someone in the grocery store who I sort of know but we don’t really talk. Nothing’s wrong – but nothing’s right. And I smiled at her, and she smiled back. It was a small thing, and it didn’t make a huge change. But it was something, and I did it for Charlotte.
So no, you didn’t have to share your story, and obviously no one would ever wish something like this upon you. But you took something horrific and used it to create incredible good. Thank you. Hashem should bentch you with only good things.