Story of Shalom:

I worked in a girls sleep-away camp this summer as the dining room manager, and I had a bit of an altercation with the Chef. He was insanely upset because a large quantity of a certain food was missing from the freezer. He was that upset — I genuinely thought the freezer had broken or some kind of catastrophe had happened. I was pretty upset too, mostly because I felt like fingers were being pointed at me.

But looking back, that part doesn’t really matter.

What matters is how I reacted.

I was upset when it happened and for the whole next day, and I said some things in a way that wasn’t the nicest.

That night I spoke to my parents. They weren’t exactly giving me the validation I was looking for. They told me I needed to have compassion for him. I did not want to hear that. I wanted someone to validate me and to tell me I was right.

Instead, they challenged me to look at the situation differently.

And eventually, I realized something.

My ego had gotten tangled up in the situation.

I had become so focused on “I was right” and “I shouldn’t have been treated this way” that I was losing sight of the bigger picture.

It wasn’t worth carrying a fight and tension that would affect everyone else, especially with a whole week of camp still ahead.

There’s a line in Pirkei Avos:

קִנְאָה וְתַאֲוָה וְכָבוֹד מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם —

jealousy, desire, and honor remove a person from the world. Kavod, our need to be respected or proven right, has a way of pulling us out of the moment and turning something small into something much bigger than it needs to be. That’s exactly what happened to me.

I don’t want to win an argument and lose my peace. And I don’t want my ego to matter more than the people around me.

So I made a decision.

The next day, I apologized to the Chef.

Not because I was wrong, and not because he was right. I’m not saying either of those things. I’ll leave that for Hashem to judge — ה’ יִשְׁפֹּט. I’m only human. I only see one small piece of the picture. What I can control is how I choose to move forward.

There’s a pasuk in Mishlei that’s stayed with me:

כַּמַּיִם הַפָּנִים לַפָּנִים, כֵּן לֵב הָאָדָם לָאָדָם —

as water reflects a face back to a person, so does one person’s heart reflect back to another. What we put into a relationship tends to come back to us. If I show up with anger, I might get anger back. If I show up softer, maybe I create room for the other person to soften too.

And if I choose to soften, perhaps I create an opening for the other person to soften too.

And that doesn’t mean I lose.

In fact, maybe that is the real strength.

Anyone can hold onto being right.

It takes much more strength to say:

“Maybe I was right. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe we were both hurt. But I don’t want to live in this tension anymore.”

And that reminded me of something I learned through Shalom for Charlotte.

Sometimes life puts us in situations where we have to choose between being right and being kind.

But maybe the real choice isn’t even right versus kind.

Maybe it’s:

What kind of person do I want to be when being right isn’t enough?

Because at the end of the day, I don’t want to win an argument and lose my peace.

I don’t want to prove my point and damage a relationship.

And I don’t want my ego to become more important than the people around me.

There will always be things we disagree about.

There will always be moments when someone hurts us, misunderstands us, or treats us unfairly.

We can’t control that.

But we can control whether we allow those moments to harden us, or whether we use them as mirrors.

And sometimes, that is where the real growth begins.

This whole lesson brought me right back to what I learned through Shalom for Charlotte, an initiative built around exactly this idea, that real peace is worth more than being right, and that letting go of a grudge can be its own kind of chesed.

So here’s what I want to leave you with.

Is there something you’re holding onto right now? A fight that never really got resolved, a person you’ve quietly written off, a moment you keep replaying because you were sure you were right?

We’re heading into the Yamim Noraim. And there’s an idea I keep coming back to: if Hashem sees that you’re going above your nature to forgive, to fargin, to let something go that you’d have every right to hold onto, He goes beyond nature for you too.

You don’t have to decide the other person was right. You don’t have to pretend it didn’t hurt. You just have to be willing to put the peace above the point.

That doesn’t mean pretending nothing happened, and it doesn’t mean abandoning your boundaries. You can believe you were justified and still choose peace.

There will always be things we disagree about. There will always be moments when someone hurts us, misunderstands us, or treats us unfairly. We can’t control that. But we can control whether we let those moments harden us, or whether we use them as mirrors.

Please take a pledge to forgive, even just one person, and be sure to check out Charlotte’s story and see the impact she left behind at such a young age.

May we all go מחיל לחיל 💕