When I was five years old, our house caught fire.

It was still dark outside—around four or five o’clock on a Sunday morning. My mother woke us from our beds, grabbed my sisters and me, and ran outside as smoke and flames consumed our home. More than thirty years later, I can still remember the smell.

A few hours later, we were standing in front of the Rebbe.

Looking back, I realize how unusual that must sound. We hadn’t spoken to the insurance company. We hadn’t figured out where we were going to live. We hadn’t begun replacing what we’d lost.

In our family, before you called the insurance company, you went to the Rebbe.

Not because we expected him to magically solve our problems.

But because that was simply where you went when life happened.

The Rebbe looked at my parents, then at each of us children, and told my parents in Yiddish, “נאָך אַ שריפה ווערט מען רייך”—“After a fire, one becomes rich.”

For years, I smiled at those words.

We never became rich—not in the way most people define wealth.

We became rich in resilience.

Rich in the certainty that even after everything burns down, life can be rebuilt.

That was one of my earliest memories of the Rebbe.

It wasn’t my strongest.

My strongest memory is the way he looked........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)