"Akiva, trust me, this is something unhealthy,” Reuven insisted. “My only question is what I’m seeing and how to react”

Akiva Putterman had a talk entitled “The Healthy Way to Fight,” in which he helped mechanchim understand the backdrop to arguments. Along with keeping their classrooms calmer, he felt it equipped them with vital skills to teach to students in maintaining peace.

It was a major principle of his that people only fight when they feel threatened, so the first step to conflict resolution was identifying the threat and evaluating whether it was real. Rabbi Putterman always liked to use the example of the time his wife discovered a mouse in the guestroom and nearly passed out from fright. She called him home from school to deal with the emergency. (He had received Rina’s permission to share the story, he always pointed out. Speakers should never tell family stories unless they were sure that the subjects of the story were okay with it.)

He drove home, parking at a funny angle like a Hatzolah member, and grabbed a broom on the way in. He hadn’t felt like such a hero since sheva brachos, he would say, and this always got a laugh.

He hurried to the basement, where his wife had locked herself into the toy closet, and then gingerly opened the door to the guestroom, ready for anything. The mouse in the corner, peeking out from under the radiator, hadn’t moved an inch.

It was there, waiting patiently for him. He crept forward, the broom raised over his head — and as he was about to bring it down, he realized that it was just a crumpled sock, bunched up so that it looked like a mouse.

That was it. He lifted it up and came out triumphantly, waving it at Rina, who, even though she saw that it was a sock, still looked unconvinced for some reason.

But the point was, they had been worried about a sock.

Many conflicts, he would say, can be resolved by identifying what it is that is causing the threat, articulating it, and analyzing it. “So often, you’re waving a broom menacingly… at a crumpled sock,” he would say, feeling it a very dramatic line.

Now, he tried it on Reuven Stagler, who was usually so receptive to his ideas.

“Nah, this is not a sock, Akiva, trust me, this is something unhealthy,” Reuven insisted. “My only question is what I’m seeing and how to react.”