The Sleepover - R. Yaakov Moskowitz - TorahAnytime.com

I heard a story a while back about a girl who was having a sleepover at another girl's home and they went for a walk and she had forgotten to bring a sweatshirt. So, the host lent her sweatshirt. Well, they all had a great time and the sleepover had ended. And sometime later, the girl who was the guest came into school wearing a sweatshirt and her friend came over and said, "Hey, that's my sweatshirt. What are you doing?" She said, "No, no, this is mine. My father bought it for me." "No, no, that's my sweatshirt." And she looked closer and she saw that there was a stain that was on the corner of the sweatshirt that had always been there. She knew that was hers. This is mine. No, my father bought this sweatshirt from me. I'm telling you. No, you stole this from me. And this fight erupts between the two of them. And the classmates join in and people start taking sides. And there's this entire argument taking place within this whole class. And this goes on for several days. Well, after a number of days, this girl brought it up at home and she had found that her older sister had taken the sweatshirt to the dry cleaners to be clean. And when they went there, they said, "Oh, let where's this sweatshirt?" And they said, "It was handed in so long ago. We have a policy that any item of clothing that's here for over 30 days, we give it to a secondhand store. And then they realized what had happened. That sweatshirt was given to the secondhand store. And this girl whose family unfortunately couldn't make ends meet, her father would shop at that secondhand store and he bought this sweatshirt for his daughter. This story is a classic example of how when we're not don is what happens. Arguments, fights, total lack of shalom. The senov tells us that one of the main reasons behind this mitzvah of being dabs is in order to create shalom amongst people. You see if we are not kosh other individuals if we don't suspect people of being negative towards us of trying to harm us. So then in turn we could think positively towards them and then our relationships are going to be so much better. It's when we're not malamed and we assume that person said something negative against me. We assume that person stole my sweatshirt. We assume that they were trying to cause me harm. That's when the lush and horror starts. That's when the negativity starts. And that's when the mahlo erupts. If we want to be able to create more shalom in all of our relationships with our spouse, with our children, with our neighbors, with our communities, then what we have to do is learn how to be House.