Rav Aryeh Levin and the Widow's Tears
A grieving widow asks Rav Aryeh Levin if all her tears and Tehillim for her husband were wasted. His answer turns her tears of sorrow into tears of hope.
Once, a distraught, recently widowed woman came to the home of Rav Aryeh Levin and cried uncontrollably. All his efforts to offer solace were to no avail until the widow said, “Rabbi, I will accept your words of consolation on one condition—please tell me what happened to all of my tears. I prayed and prayed for my late husband. I recited chapter after chapter of Tehillim and shed thousands upon thousands of tears. My very soul flowed into those tears. Were they all wasted?”
Gently, Rav Aryeh replied, “After 120 years, when you will leave this world and ascend to the heavens, you will see how meaningful and precious your tears were. You will discover that Hashem himself gathered them in and counted every single teardrop and treasured it like a priceless gem, and you will discover that whenever some harsh and evil decree was looming over the Jewish people, one of your tears came and washed the evil away, making it null and void. Even one sincere tear is a source of salvation. Hearing this, the woman burst into a fresh load of tears—not tears of sorrow and grief, but tears of courage and hope. Sometime later, the widow came back to Rav Aryeh and said, “Remember what you told me before? Please repeat it for me.”