“The only way to win the war is to make peace” Shelly says to herself constantly since Aunt Hinda showed up unexpectedly last week with her three young children.
Aunt Hinda is a fine person only she eats on the couch. Shelly asks her not to but Aunt Hinda explains they “only eat rice cakes and cereal on couches ” and holds up the little plastic bag to show Shelly how careful she is about it saying “What’s the big deal?” Then she laughs as if the request were too trivial to take seriously considering her dire circumstances.
Three days into the visit the couches are full of specks of crumbs and small oily fingerprints.
Shelly tries and tries. Nicely sternly even angrily. Anger works the least.
Then one morning after days of battle Shelly realizes something. The only way to win the war is to make peace and the only way to keep the couches clean and my heart at rest is to cover the couches.
She covers the couches. The living room looks like a ghost town for two weeks but afterward there will be no stains and in the meantime there’s peace.
Shelly starts to see things she never saw before. She sees how each person has that thing he’ll go to war over go behind backs and sneak to get. We might violate our own values and standards to get that thing we think we need..
It can be as small as the two-hour hot water cycle Aunt Hinda insists on “so the clothes smell good ” even if it uses double the electricity detergent and water.
She thought about the family down the street how the father who couldn’t let go of money lost his whole family instead. How in war we lose whole towns cities and countries. And so many lives. And how sometimes we ourselves don’t even know what we’re fighting for.
But there was something else bothering Shelly. She didn’t know exactly what it was or what was happening but lately ever since she got upset about the crumbs whenever Aunt Hinda would eat on the couch there was something that had the taste of cruelty in it.
She thinks how blessed she is to know there are halachos to train us to be sensitive — like not to take from another person’s plate or not to look at another person’s plate. Teaching us to be sensitive both for our own sake and for the sake of others.
Orchos Tzaddikim tells us to root out cruelty from our souls.
And Shelly realizes one of the things she fights for gets cruel about are the times when she wants and needs peace and quiet. How she thirsts for it and how sometimes she fights those closest to her to get it.
And in walks Aunt Hinda taking over all the peace and quiet. Maybe it’s not the crumbs on the couch Shelly wants to stop but the intrusion on her most sacred thing — peace and quiet. And then she forgets the goal and is like the one who violates her own values and standards when it comes to someone else and maybe when she speaks to Aunt Hinda about those crumbs her words are covered with specks of anger and oily fingerprints of cruelty.
She believed she needed to go to war to get peace.
Shelly does an about-face withdraws her forces and follows the manual. “Love truth and peace ” it says in Zecharyah. “The best plot you can make against your foe is to convert him to your love if you are able ” says the Orchos Tzaddikim.
She works on taking the crumbs of anger out of her heart and finds peace and quiet in the noise. —