Now What?

B"H, 

A New Work Begins...

It is a very difficult task for us who have only known toughness in its abusive form to see it in its uplifting and elevating realm. By the same token, how do we visualize kindness as an evil killer when we have only been nurtured and tenderly embraced by those who embody its spirit.  Is it possible for toughness to save lives and for kindness to destroy them?  These are some of the dilemmas we encounter when our personal ways fail us...

What gives us a reason to learn other ways?  

Bashi Kohanchi loved her parents.  They were a most unusual couple.  Her father's family was Persian and had moved to Manchester, England.  Her mother, Leah, was Eastern European, from a shtetl where they said "chawsday" and not "chasdoh", as in "key l'olam chasdoh"*.  Don't know where that town was located nor what its name was; it is all ashes now.  

Leah was a tiny woman who carried the burden of change in her heart.  She bore her befuddlement with tremendous graciousness.  Who else could survive confusion as well as she?  Chased from one shtetl to another by waves of pogroms and rescued by her big city relatives and adopted into their family embrace, she left the ashes and destruction of her early years behind.  (This was all before Hitler, may his name be blotted out of the world.)  Leah and her swarthy husband Mr. Kohanchi moved to America for business.  And here they stayed while six million were ripped from this world and turned to smoke.  They lived in America where even the doorknobs were treif.  Leah made peace with that too.  

Leah was an agreeable young lady and she became a very agreeable old lady, a matriarch.  Years later, the children, Bashi and her brothers, and the grandchildren, there were so many of them, would ask her how she could make and accept so much that they could not, no, that they would not tolerate.  We are all so spoiled, so pampered.  

She answered that it was always a pleasure and an honor to live the life that G_d, HaKadosh Baruch Hu*, offered her.  

Definitions

* Psalm 136, the refrain in Hebrew (vide infra, a nice Sephardi version).

* Literally: The Holy One, Blessed be He.