Adapted from: A Heart for Another by Rabbi Yaakov Bender

There are moments in a person’s life that live on, single encounters or conversations that replay, again and again, for years. One such moment can shape an entire life.

My mother, Rebbetzin Basya Bender, was a chiddush, a novelty — an immigrant to this country and a young almanah. The lone survivor in her family, she rose above pain to not only raise us on her own, but to inspire and guide hundreds of bnos Yisrael as a beloved and effective teacher.

She was a woman of resilience and faith, but if I had to identify the moment when her strength and spirit shone most brightly, it was early on a Shabbos morning.

It was not just any Shabbos morning: It was that week, in the autumn of 1965, when we were sitting shivah for my father zatzal, who had been niftar so suddenly and unexpectedly.

Every one of us was lost without him. That Leil Shabbos, she worked to keep our mood upbeat during the seudah, to show us that we would be able to carry on as a family, that Shabbos was still Shabbos.

It could not have been easy.

That night, we all slept. It had been an exhausting week, emotionally and physically, and we must have slept very deeply. When we started to come down on Shabbos morning, we rubbed our eyes in disbelief.

The house was in complete and total disarray, furniture toppled over, sefarim thrown all over the floor, and the cabinets empty. The house had been ransacked, thieves obviously coming in during the night and robbing whatever valuables they could find.

It was too much. The house was a mess. We had been in financial distress before this, and there was certainly no money to replace whatever had been taken.

But especially painful was the fact that they had taken away that which was most precious to us — the small reminders of our father that had remained.It shook us up. Whatever sense of calm we might have had was shattered. It was just too much. It seemed so unfair, the blow that would make all the challenges with which we had been confronted that week unbearable.

Then we heard our mother’s footsteps and we froze. How would she handle it?

She came down the stairs and saw what happened. She — a woman in a strange country, her parents gone, having suddenly lost her husband a few days earlier and faced with the burden of feeding and clothing us on her own when money was tight — looked around at the damage, and then she looked at our faces.

“Kinderlach,” she said, “we don’t cry over things that can be replaced.”

One line, but one line that gave us such clarity. There are times to cry, when tears are appropriate. And there are times when tears have no purpose or place. Items, even with sentimental value, are replaceable, and we would not allow the loss of mere objects to pull us down.

And here is the enduring lesson of my mother and her lesson on that Shabbos morning.

If ever in my life I felt like an umlal, a despondent person, it was that week, during those terrifying, confusing days in which the foundation of our lives had been pulled out from underneath us. That blow — the invasion and robbery — had the potential to be so devastating, that extra challenge that would have made the whole situation unendurable.

But she didn’t let that happen, and in doing so, she sent us another message. The rule in Chazal is that “middah tovah merubah mimiddas puraniyos — Hashem’s measure of good is greater than His measure of punishment” (Sotah 11a). From this we can extrapolate that if a harsh word to an umlal can be devastating, then a kind word to an umlal has the potential to build, reassure, and restore.

At that moment, our mother gave us the gift of a perspective and attitude that can carry a person through so many difficulties — we don’t cry over that which can be replaced. And instead of sinking deeper into pain, it gave us a way forward.

Our loss was significant, but we still had each other, and everyone was healthy. We would find strength in one another. We would continue in our father’s way and make her proud.

If we did not become umlalim, it was because of her. She gave us our lives.