Her Israeli-born daughter Rikki she should live and be well taught her third-generation American mother a Sabra trick this Shabbos.

“Take the plastic wrapping off the sack of potatoes and use it for washing the dishes on Shabbos.”

Rikki’s mother was amazed. The dishes were shining. No forbidden squeezing and free.

Not only free nothing wasted.

This was a chiddush a new reality for Rikki’s mother who grew up believing everything was created to be used once and thrown away.

She used to watch in awe as her mother-in-law a”h who lived through Auschwitz lovingly saved half sets of shoelaces how she’d wrap it in a plastic bag to store it away for rainier days.

“I’ll buy you new ones” Rikki’s mother would say.

But her mother-in-law’s couch was bought for a lifetime. She didn’t let children jump on it. She didn’t drip morning coffee on it. They didn’t throw something out because the color was no longer in style. Everything in her mother-in-law’s home had a feeling of permanence warmth importance and value.

This was the way they lived life too. People that got “scratched up” or “bent” weren’t “thrown away.” They were restored with care.

Rikki’s American-born mother has a heavy old pair of silver candlesticks. They’re a little bent and battered. A leg missing. One day she went all over town trying to find out if and how she could trade them in for a sleeker style.

When they were weighed she was told she could get a quarter of what they’d be worth new.

How many prayers had been said over those candlesticks? How many tears were cried? Could she just trade them in like that?

Her thoughts went back and forth about it for weeks. A shiny modern sleek look on her dining-room table or the heavy-bottomed over-flowered ones with the broken leg? She was actually on her way out the door old candlesticks in her bag ready to trade in when her husband the heir of his mother’s lessons asked her “Where are you going with the candlesticks?”

“To trade them in” she answers.

“Give it a few days thought” he suggests.

She had already given it more than a few days thought. She was finally ready to do the deed. But her husband’s request weighed heavier than the candlesticks so she called the silversmith instead “Can you fix some bumps bruises and a broken leg?”

She thought about one of the exhibits she’d seen in the Jewish art museum in Heichal Shlomo in a building adjacent to the Great Synagogue in the heart of Jerusalem a museum it seemed hardly anyone knows about. There was this amazingly richly reconstructed aron kodesh made by an artist who had spotted some pieces of mahogany from a former aron kodesh in a heap of rubble on some side street in Jerusalem and worked to put back together to bring it back to life.

Someone young or even old must have dumped the wood there not understanding its value. The honor it had had to hold a sefer Torah. The expense love and sacrifice it took to bring it over from Europe. So many pieces of the past just sitting waiting for people to visit so their stories should not be lost and their struggles wasted.

She thought about her mother-in-law. How after the war after surviving the camps she used to sit all day in her rocking chair under the lace-curtained window in Boro Park whispering words from her book of Tehillim.

She thinks about her own daughter Rikki named after mother-in-law who also says the entire book of Tehillim every Shabbos. And she thinks how no thought no prayer not one tear — nothing is wasted.