Charlotte’s Legacy of Shalom

“Less than two hours and their lives are changed forever.”

That was my friend’s reaction when her cousin lost a child. It had been a beautiful Tuesday afternoon in the first week of June when this young girl, who was out riding her bike along with the rest of the neighborhood, was hit by a car. She was rushed to the hospital in critical condition, and the EMS team and doctors did everything they could to save her, but it was not to be. She was eight years old.

The person who had been driving the car was her father’s best friend.

At the funeral the next morning, the bereaved father spoke. He said that he had been asking himself, again and again, since the night before, why this could have possibly happened. And the only conclusion he could come to, he explained, was that it was a test from God to see how the community would stand up in the face of tragedy. Would they come together, or would they allow themselves to be torn apart? Standing there, having not yet buried his daughter, he made a pledge that he would not allow this moment to become a point of division and disunity. He made a pledge, then and there, to pass this test from God.

Since then, a new movement has grown, beginning in the local community but quickly spreading to the far reaches of the Jewish world. It’s called Shalom for Charlotte, and it’s simple: In memory of their daughter, Charlotte, the family has created an initiative to encourage every member of the Jewish people to forgive the person who wronged them. And thousands upon thousands of people have answered the call. The website is filled with testimonies of people who have dropped years-long family feuds, who reached out to people who hurt them terribly, who are mending fences with neighbors. And that’s just the record of people who have posted publicly.

At the time of writing, the fast of the Ninth of Av is looming ahead this week. We are right in the middle of the period known as the Nine Days, which begins on the first day of the month of Av and ends with the fast on the ninth. The Ninth of Av is, historically, a bad day for the Jewish people. It began back in the desert with the Sin of the Spies, and it continued with the destruction of both temples. The sages teach us that the destruction of the second temple, in particular, was caused by baseless hatred among Jews—feuding, fighting, judging, and holding grudges.

It cannot be an accident, either, that the first of Av is the day that Aaron, the first high priest, died in the desert. Aaron is described in the tractate Avot as one who was “a lover of peace and one who chases after peace” (Avot 1:12). Following Aaron’s death recorded in the middle of the book of Numbers, the verse relates, “All of the Jewish people cried for Aaron for thirty days” (20:29). Rashi notes the use of the word all, and he says that the added word indicates how beloved Aaron was as a figure, specifically because he sought to make peace between disputing parties—including, says Rashi, between husband and wife.

Aaron’s legacy is one of peace. He was the first high priest, yes, but he’s best remembered as the man who did everything he could to bring harmony to the Jewish people. And it is the anniversary of his death which begins the heightened period of the Nine Days, culminating in the day in which we commemorate the destruction of the temple which was brought about because we, as a people, had strayed so very far from Aaron’s legacy.

The Talmud asserts, forcefully, “Every generation in which [the temple] is not built is charged as if [that generation] destroyed it” (Jerusalem Talmud, Yoma 5a). Rabbi Moses Schreiber, one of the leading Hungarian rabbis of the nineteenth century, explains that each year that the temple is not rebuilt, it is as though we were the ones, in this very year, to bring about its destruction because we are guilty of the perpetuating the same sins as our forebears who lived nearly two thousand years ago. We have no right, he says, to think of ourselves as better than the generation that saw the temple burn, that was taken to Rome in chains, that had to learn to pick up the pieces of a shattered national life and rebuild.

There is a long-standing custom at this time of year to actively work to increase our ahavat Yisrael, our love for our fellow Jews, specifically to counter our national—and generational—culpability in the destruction of the temple. And this year especially, after watching how a family could turn unimaginable pain into a rallying cry for an entire people, it feels that much more urgent.

It doesn’t have to be any earth-shattering. It can be as simple as reaching out to someone with whom you have not spoken in a while. And the best time to do it is right now. Let us together, as a nation dwelling in harmony, take the steps to perpetuate peace within our people so that God may spread His canopy of peace over us, over the entire Jewish nation, over a rebuilt Jerusalem, and over the world as a whole.

In memory of Shaindel OB”M daughter of Chaim Yehuda Leib