Parasha Ki Tezte -- Returning a Lost Object

The Case of the Lost Tefillin

I am sure many of us have had the experience of our luggage being lost by an airline. We all know that sinking feeling of waiting for our checked luggage at the luggage carousel, and one by one all of the passengers on your flight collect their luggage and leave, and you are still waiting. It is obvious the airline has misplaced your luggage. You have to through the hassle of reporting it, and usually the airline finds it and delivers it to your destination within 24 hours. Sometimes, however, the passenger and his or her luggage are, for whatever reason, never re-united. Ever wonder where lost luggage ends up? It ends up in Scottsboro, Alabama, at a Superstore called Unclaimed Baggage Center. This is a 40,000 foot “Superstore” that attracts close to one million visitors annually and employs 140 people. If an airline cannot find the owner of luggage, The Unclaimed Baggage Center buys the luggage and sells its contents to customers who shop at the store.

Most of what the store sells are things that you would expect people to travel with – clothes, electronics, books, and household items. There are also unusual items for sale at the store – car engines, moose antlers, full suits of armor to name a few. Some people apparently travel with suitcases full of cheese, vacuum packed frogs, and armadillos.  The best find ever was a 5.8 carat diamond solitaire ring.

One day last year, Rabbi Uri Pilichowski was shopping in this store looking for some cheap cell phones. He came upon a very unusual find – seven pair of tefillin – sitting on a shelf in the aisle between ladies dresses and bathing suits.  For those of you who might not know, tefillin or phylacteries in English, are two small black cubes containing scriptural verses written on vellum.  Traditional Jews attach these cubes to themselves using leather straps, one on the arm and one on the head, during weekday morning prayers. Now, high quality tefillin like the ones Rabbi Pilichowski saw at this store can run upwards of a thousand dollars a pair!  The store, however, was selling these tefillin at $45 dollars a pair. The obviously had no idea what they had, or their value.

Rabbi Pilichowski could have done one of three things at this moment. He could have seen this as a financial opportunity. He could buy these seven sets of tefillin, all in excellent condition, for $45 each and sell them to fellow Jews for between $500 and $1000 dollars apiece. He would make a killing in the tefillin market, and his buyers would have purchased quality tefillin at a discounted price. In other words, we might say, a win-win situation. Alternately, he could have simply passed them by, comfortable with the fact that the owners had probably already been compensated for their loss through the airline insurance company. He could have reasoned that they had replaced these lost tefillin with new ones long ago, and there was no point in going to the trouble of finding their owners.

Which would you have done – gone for the profit or simply moved on? Rabbi Pilichowski did neither of these. It occurred to Rabbi Pilichowski that he could neither profit from the re-sale of these tefillin nor simply ignore their existence. The Torah was clear. The mitzvah of “Hashavat Aveida”, of returning a lost object, was a commandment, not an option. “You shall not see the ox of your brother or his sheep or goat cast off and ignore them, you shall return it to your brother …. So shall you do for his garment, and so shall you do for any lost article of your brother that may become lost from him and you find it – you must not ignore it.”  Rabbi Pilichowski resolved to try to return these valuable religious articles to their owners, in keeping with this mitzvah found in our Torah reading this week. He bought the seven pair of tefillin for $45 each and set off to find their owners.

But how does one do that? These tefillin could belong to anyone in the world! When I was a child there was a section in the local newspaper in the classified ads called “Lost and Found”.  I doubt if that exists anymore. Even if it did, which newspapers should he advertise in? The owners of these tefillin could be anywhere in the world! He decided to post photos of each pair on Facebook, explaining that he was looking for the owners. Within hours the post had been shared 2000 times. In a matter of days he was able to find the owners of six of the seven pair of Tefillin and return them.

One pair was not found through Facebook. It had a tag inside of the Tefillin bag with the name “Malka”. Rabbi Pilichowski had once attended a Passover Seder in Ukraine with someone with that name. “How many people have that last name?” he reasoned. So he reached out to this person, who he knew was now living in Los Angeles. Yossi Malka, 37, immediately confirmed that he had lost Tefillin during a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina. The tefillin had belonged to his father, David Malka, who died several months earlier at age 58 from pancreatic cancer. Before he died, he bequeathed his cherished Tefillin to his oldest grandson, Abie, who would be soon celebrating his bar mitzvah. Needless to say, the family was devastated by the loss of this precious family heirloom, and overjoyed to have it returned.

Our sages ask, why is it even necessary to have a commandment in the Torah to return a lost object? Isn’t it obvious that we should do so? Doesn’t this fall under common human decency? How could one even think of keeping something one has found that belongs to someone else?  The answer they give is that a commandment is necessary to overcome both the greed that might lead a person to keep a valuable object they found, or the inertia that tempts one to just put the lost object away and do nothing about it. Human beings can be lazy. We might just ignore a lost object to avoid the trouble involved in returning it. Was Rabbi Pilichowski the first Jewish person who saw those tefillin in the store and recognized them for what they were? Highly unlikely! But everyone else looked at them with curiosity and just walked by. Everyone else looked the other way. Rabbi Pilichowsky, however, felt that it was his obligation under Torah law to at least try to return these lost items to their proper owners.

May the example of Rabbi Pilichowsky motivate each of us to do the right thing when we come upon a lost object.  It may mean more to the owner, and to us, than we could ever imagine.[1]

Shabbat Shalom

[1] I am grateful to Rabbi Jack Reimer for suggesting this topic and for guiding me to the news article in the New York Daily News dated July 3, 2014, which gave the account upon which this sermon is based.

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Parasha Re-eh:  Do Not Inquire

Portrain of Shimon Abeles
from a book at the Jewish
Museum, Prague, c. 1728

All we can be certain of is that he was ten years old when he died. He was a Jewish boy and the grandson of a prominent leader of the Jewish community in Prague in the late 17^th century. His death in 1694 will forever remain a mystery. His father claimed he died of natural causes. The medical faculty of Charles University, then a Jesuit stronghold, claimed he died a violent death. His father, Lazar, was arrested and charged with murdering his son to prevent his conversion to Christianity, about which the boy had shown some interest.  Lazar died from torture before the authorities could extract a confession. Although Shimon Abeles, the ten year old boy, was never baptized, he was declared a Christian saint and a martyr, and buried in Prague’s Tyn Church, in the Old Town Square.

I stood in front of that very church in January, 2009 as part of a Rabbinic mission to Prague and Israel with the Chicago Rabbinic Action Committee. It was in front of that church that I first heard the story of Shimon Abeles. Afterward, the group of rabbis went into the Church to see Shimon’s burial place. Not all of the rabbis went into the church, however. Our Orthodox colleagues remained outside.

The reason they stayed outside, on that bitterly cold January day is based on a verse from our Torah reading for this week. In our Torah portion, the Jewish people are about to enter the Land of Canaan. G-d is worried about their sliding back into idolatry when they come in contact with the Canaanite people who worship their gods in abominable ways. After the sin of the Golden Calf, G-d knows how susceptible the people might be to succumbing to idolatrous forms of worship. So, he tells the people, “Beware of being lured into their ways after they have been destroyed. Do not inquire about their gods, saying, “How did those nations worship their gods? I too will follow their practices.” Thus my Orthodox colleagues refused to enter the Church, lest they violate that commandment to inquire about other religions.

Most of us here this evening take a different view entirely toward inquiry into other cultures and religious practices. We encourage intellectual inquiry into other faiths, cultures and modes of worship. We hope that others take an interest in us as well.  In some cases this may indeed lead to the observance of another religion.  In the United States, 34% of American adults currently have a religious identity different from the one in which they were raised! What was a relatively rare occurrence at the time of Shimon Abeles is a common practice in present day America.   In fact, some firmly believe that our inquiry into the faith and customs of others leads to understanding of one another that is crucial to the very survival of our world. We Americans place freedom of knowledge and inquiry among our highest values.

One of the major differences between what we call “Modern Orthodox” Judaism and what we call “Ultra-Orthodox” also known as “Haredi” Judaism is the degree to which inquiry and exploration outside of the religious community is tolerated. “Modern Orthodoxy” encourages its members to engage fully with Western culture. It believes that secular ideas and insights can inform Torah knowledge, just as Torah knowledge can inform secular ideas. Ultra-Orthodoxy, or the “Haredi”, on the other hand, sees little value in teachings outside of their own circles. Their rabbis seek to isolate their members from contact with outside world, be they secular ideas, ideas from other religions, or ideas from non-Orthodox forms of Judaism. They see non-Haredi ideas as potentially corrupting and leading their adherents astray.

Ultra-Orthodox leaders will go to extra-ordinary lengths to keep the outside, outside.   Just imagine the challenge posed by the   ever present smart phone.  As we all know, we have at our finger tips a previously unimaginable  wealth of knowledge through Smart Phone technology.  When they first came on the market, Haredi rabbis condemned Smart Phones as a new evil. One prominent leader said they were as destructive as weapons, and another publicly destroyed a Smart Phone to get that message across. In 2013, however, Rami Levy Communications, an Israeli company, came out with a kosher smart phone. How can a smart phone be kosher, you ask? It actually has a heksher, that is, rabbinical certification that it is permitted to use. What convinced the rabbis that a smart phone CAN be kosher? This is a phone that one can make a call on, one can text on, one can email on, but one whose search engine has been disabled. In its place, there are apps.  Approved apps.  Apps that Haredi Rabbis have deemed appropriate. There were 600 approved apps when the phone came out in 2013. The company hopes that this number will eventually reach 20,000.

Some Haredi authorities are doubling down on the ban on “non-kosher” cell phones. It was reported in June of this year that anyone possessing a “non-kosher” cell phone at the Musayof Synagogue in Jerusalem is disqualified from leading prayers during worship services.

Intellectual freedom, the ability to explore ideas outside of one’s own narrow experience, may constitute a risk.  One might become attracted to the religious beliefs and practices of the other, as the Torah seems to fear.  The ideas of others may challenge and call into question one’s own beliefs. One might even be tempted to go down unhealthy or even self-destructive paths. But such strict limitations on inquiry demonstrate a lack of confidence in the ability of one’s tradition to hold onto its own in the face of competing forces.  The answer to this dilemma, in my opinion, is not to control access to the ideas of those who are different from us. The answer is to study Torah, and to teach our traditions to our children so that we can pass them on. I believe when we truly educate ourselves in our Judaism we come to see and understand the beauty, the power and the logic of our faith. Once do we will want to maintain it and embrace it in the face of all challenges to it that we might confront.

Shabbat Shalom

It is from this week’s Torah portion, Ekev, that we are taught that we should thank G-d for the food we eat.  “When you have eaten and been satisfied,” the text says, “you shall thank Adonai, your G-d for the good land which G-d has given you.”  The Torah does not tell us HOW we should bless G-d, however. It doesn’t tell us the exact words we should say. It was up to the rabbis of the Talmud to develop this blessing.  It’s a good thing they did.  Otherwise we would  all be on our own when it comes to thanking G-d for the blessings of food. Some of us might recall the hilariously awkward scene in the 2000 movie “Meet the Parents”. Greg, (played by Ben Stiller) visiting his fiancé Pam’s home for the first time is invited to “say grace” by Jack, Pam’s father, played by Robert Deniro. Greg wings it – and we all cringe!

Meet the Parents: Greg Says Grace  (click to see clip) 

The rabbis of antiquity developed a series of four blessings to thank G-d for food.  The first blessing thanks G-d for providing food for ALL creatures.   The second blessing is narrower in scope. It thanks G-d for the Land of Israel and its bounty. It also thanks G-d for redeeming us from Egypt, for establishing a covenant with the People of Israel, and for the Torah. The third blessing is also particular to the Jewish people.  It asks G-d to have mercy on Israel and to restore the symbols of political sovereignty to the land of Israel – Jerusalem, the House of David, and the Temple.  The fourth blessing moves us back to a wider scope, as it describes G-d as the “ruler of the universe” who is a “sovereign who is good to all.”  It concludes by asking G-d to always bestow upon us grace, kindness, and compassion.

When we recite Grace we are reminded to be grateful to G-d for all that we have.  We are also reminded that although we have worked hard for the food that is before us, none of it would be there were it not for the goodness of G-d, who is the ultimate provider of this food.  We are, as it were, dependent on G-d for our sustenance.  Yet, it is far better to be dependent on G-d, than to be dependent on others for our food.  Our Grace After Meals acknowledges the shame that often comes with dependency on others when it says in the third paragraph:

Please, O Lord our God, do not make us dependent on the gifts or the loans of other people, but only on your full, open, holy, and generous hand, so that we may not ever suffer shame or humiliation. [The Sephardic tradition adds to this:]  “For the gifts that others give are small, and the embarrassment that they cause is great.”

Tsedaka, or charity, is an important value in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We must give to those in need, but when we do, we must do it with sensitivity to the feelings of those to whom we give.  The story is told of Reuben, an honest man who has fallen on hard times. He asks his friend Simon to lend him some money. “I won’t lend you the money,” said Simon, “I give it to you as a gift.” Simon thought he was being magnanimous. But Reuben was so ashamed and embarrassed that he promised himself he would never ask Simon for a loan again.  In offering to give Reuben the money instead of loaning it to him, Simon humiliated him by making him feel like he was no longer an equal, but was part of a lower class, a beggar.

The Grace After Meals is a prayer that makes us aware of G-d’s presence in our lives and our gratefulness for G-d’s gifts. It also reminds us that it is not enough to give to those less fortunate -- we must do it in a way that safeguards the dignity of those who are in need.

Shabbat Shalom