What We Don't See

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, September 2, 2006

Have you ever played “hide and go seek” with a very young child? There is a certain stage when they completely believe that if they can’t see you then you can’t see them. They will stand in the middle of the room, with their hands over their eyes, feeling very secure in their hiddenness.

Our Torah portion this week, makes the point that adults play this hiding game too. We too pretend that what we don’t notice, doesn’t exist. Sometimes it is a problem in our lives that we chose to ignore until it becomes the proverbial elephant in the living room. Sometimes it is the suffering of people who though nearby remain unseen, like the low paid workers in our communities. And sometimes we even hide our own true selves, as our tradition discusses in tying this portion to the upcoming high holidays.

The issue of hiding comes up in the section of the laws dealing with lost property. Three times the portion advises us not to “hitalem” loosely translated not to remain indifferent or not to ignore the problem, more literally, not to hide oneself. First we are told that when we see a lost animal wandering around, we shouldn’t pretend we don’t notice it but must return it to its owner. The commandment is intensified with the reminder that even if the owner is unknown to us, or lives far away so that returning the animal or object would be a nuisance, still we cannot remain indifferent to its plight. And finally, even if this requires some real exertion on our part, as when an overloaded animals falls on the road and needs help with the lightening of the burden and in being pulled back up on its feet, even in that case, we can’t pretend we don’t notice and walk on by. This mitzvah of hasheivat avedah, of returning lost property, in addition to having the practical benefit of reuniting people with their property and sparing animals pain, also becomes a test of our moral perception, a marker of our ethical intelligence.

This being Labor Day weekend, congregations of all religious faiths are taking time to reflect on the situation of workers in our communities. Our local Interfaith Council has been involved with two groups of workers this summer. The first are hospital workers. The Interfaith Council has found that in some hospitals, staffing levels are so low that doctors are suggesting that family members stay with their hospitalized loved ones at all times. Local clergy have visited the negotiations going on right now at two local hospitals to remind the corporate owners, HCA, of these hospitals, that this is an issue not only for the workers but also for our community. A second group of workers whose situation has come to the attention of our Interfaith Council are hotel workers. Many of these are very low paid workers, who have little job security, work without benefits, and with increasingly difficult work loads. They are invisible to us, when we stay at hotels during vacations, or have family visit us for special occasions like a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, but we cannot ignore their situation or remain indifferent to their plight. This fall the Interfaith Council will be collecting cards of support for these and other ignored workers in our community.

Finally there is a connection between these laws of lost property and the laws of repentance. The same Hebrew word for returning a lost object, also is used for returning to God. One rabbi suggests that it is as if our soul was a little lamb that had lost its way . We need to examine it carefully for signs of ownership and then recognize it as belonging to God. Another way to think about this is to imagine that we have within us our best selves, but that sometimes, we become so hidden from ourselves, that we ourselves lose track of the goodness and the potentials that exist within us. During the month of Elul we need to wake up from the trance of everyday life, to remove the hands from across our eyes, and return to the self we were meant to be.

Our tradition has many stories about great mitzvahs related to the return of lost property, of individuals who guarded the property of others for long periods of time before someone could come to claim it, or who went to great lengths to find its owner. Maybe we had a situation like that in our own lives, where we felt the relief of being reunited with a lost address book or family heirloom that we had given up for lost. During this month of Elul, the rabbis remind us, that as great as our happiness in having some thing returned to us, even greater will be our true joy in being returned to ourselves.