Friday, December 29, 2017

Parhsat Vayechi - Friends and forgiveness

This week marked the start for the theme of "Friends" in the lower school. I spoke to the 1st thru 3rd graders at the shabbat assembly about the power of forgiving. As friends we sometimes say things or do things to one another that hurt feelings. Sometime we act to quickly without thinking.

If a person realizes and makes a real apology we should forgive and forget. I shared that Yosef and his brothers had a difficult relationship. Once Yosef saw that his brothers were sorry for how they treated him, Yosef revealed himself to them. He took care of them and saved them.

There was a story in the paper this week about a person who did somethings that was really not nice to a group of people. He was arrested for his actions. Given time to reflect he acknowledged that he had made a very poor choice. He wrote a warm and heartfelt apology letter to this group. Guess what? This group wrote a forgiveness letter to him. Even more a few days ago, this person received another letter from this group and it had a check in it. This group knew that this person was having a difficult time getting back in his feet and wanted to help a "friend".

Our situations are hopefully not as serious as this story, but look how far this group went in their forgiveness. We should learn an important lesson of friendship, and kindness from this story

(Here is the link to the story as it appeared in the NY Times this week. I changed the details in retelling it to the students but the message is the same.)

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