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“Restoring Our Brothers’ Losses” Of all of the parashiyot in the Torah, Ki Tetzei has the most number of mitzvot—Jewish legal obligations. (It has 74 out of the traditional 613.) The question for the darshan, for the preacher, is not “ What is there to talk about?” but which mitzvah to focus upon. For me, it is simple: There’s a mitzvah in this parashah that has always been one of my favorites. When I first studied Talmud, I studied the chapter (chapter two in tractate Bava Metzia) that is based on this one verse, and if there is any text that I think exemplifies Judaism and Jewish values, and applies to us on this very day, it is this one. The mitzvah is the mitzvah to return a lost object, and it reads as follows:
Let’s examine this verse by verse. First, we learn that if we happen to come upon a lost ox or goat, we can’t just ignore it. Our seeing it imposes a level of responsibility on us. That’s very different from American law. In America, the slogan “finders keepers, losers weepers” applies. The mere fact that I see something that might belong to someone doesn’t necessarily impose on me a duty to return it. But in Jewish law it does. As soon as I see it, I’m responsible. Next we learn that we have this duty even if it isn’t convenient to fulfill it. Even if we live far away from the owner, or he or she lives far away from us, we still have that duty. The notion is that even if we have to put ourselves out for awhile, well, we still have to do it. Think what this meant in ancient days: if you found an ox or a goat, you had to bring it home and take care of it. You had to give it shelter. You had to feed it. Now the Talmud makes clear that if eventually the owner comes and claims it, you deserve to be compensated for your expenses, but you have to incur them. If you fail to do so, if you let that animal suffer, starve, or die, you are liable. Once you see it, the responsibility is yours. Third, we learn that this applies not only to an ox or a goat, but even to a donkey or a garment, in fact it applies to anything that your brother loses and that you find. We must not remain indifferent, no matter what! There is one detail that we’ve glossed over, a critical detail that leaves one last question unresolved. To whom in fact does this text apply? After all, the text literally teaches us that if we see our brother’s ox or sheep gone astray, we have to take it back to him. It doesn’t say anything about what our duty is if somebody else suffers a loss. And since the text repeats the word “brother” over and over again (five times), you might very well think that it only applies to brothers and not to anyone else. Well, the rabbis—the Jewish sages and scholars of late antiquity—made it easy for us. The rabbis were devoted readers of the text, but they were not strict constructionists. Even though the text uses the word “brother,” they instructed us not to read this text literally, but to read it liberally. This law applies, they said, not only when our biological or legal brothers suffer a loss, not only when our sisters, or our cousin or our neighbor suffer a loss, but whenever anyone in our community—in fact, anyone even outside of our community—does. In our global economy, we can and should extend this all the way. Not just members of our family, not just members of our community, but anyone. Well, that’s all well and good. It sounds nice. But for those of us who haven’t come upon a lost ox lately, how does this apply to us? How does it apply to us, today? There are, I suppose, a few people somewhere in this country, who have not looked at a newspaper or a television screen during the past several weeks. I don’t happen to know any of them, but I’m sure there are some. But those of us who have read the papers, or watched TV, or picked up the news from our computers, have watched as hundreds of thousands of citizens of our country have become displaced. We have seen them lose their homes, their cars, their livelihoods. They have not lost just an ox or a goat or a sheep, they haven’t just lost a garment or a sack of grain, … they’ve lost everything. The question is, what is our responsibility in the face of this massive loss? We have seen folks lose so much! But perhaps we could say, “Well, I’ve seen them lose their homes, but what can I do? I haven’t become richer! I haven’t found anything that I can give back to them! This law is very nice, and all that, but there’s no direct application of this law to this situation!” But in fact there is. The rabbis interpreted this law, as I said earlier, rather freely. It doesn’t just apply to brothers – for anyone can be my brother. It doesn’t just apply to livestock, cattle or objects. It applies to health and well-being and honor and respect! For example, they said that if ever you should come upon a person who has lost something – even something not exactly physical, even something that you can’t put a financial value on, and it is in your power to restore it, then you have that duty, even if you’re not restoring precisely what was lost. For example, let us say that you are a doctor, and you encounter a patient who has lost his good health. If you can restore it to him, you have the duty to care for him. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean that you have to do it for nothing, that doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve to be compensated, but you do have to treat him. You cannot simply ignore him. The same is true of honor; the same is true of self-respect. Certainly that applies here. Through the medium of television or videophones or photography, we have seen, and therefore we have encountered the displaced refugees of Katrina. Seeing is not a morally neutral act. We can and therefore must reach into our hearts and souls and offer to help them. It’s not an option; it’s our duty to restore them their losses. We can’t simply sit back and move on to other things. We have seen it, we have experienced it, and therefore we must act. We “must not remain indifferent.” That’s it in a nutshell. The Jewish concept of collective responsibility is expressed very eloquently and very concretely in this short passage. Let me conclude with one little hope. Let’s hope that as each of us looks upon those scenes of devastation, we will say to ourselves, “Those are my brothers and sisters down there. They may not be close, I may not know who they are, but they are part of my family. They deserve my support.” If we do that, then no matter how long it takes, and no matter how much sacrifice these folks are still going to have to endure, one thing will be certain: we will have restored to them their self-respect, their faith in humanity and, the most precious thing of all, without which nothing is possible: their hope in the future. So may we act. Amen. |
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