Returning Lost Objects

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Rabbi Jack Reimer, a retired Conservative rabbi, tells the best stories. He’s a friend of Rabbi Pressman’s, and perhaps through that connection this story came to me. 

It must go back a few years, as it’s a time without cell phones and pda’s, in fact the story starts in a phone booth, something we don’t see too often these days. 

Rabbi Reimer stepped into a phone booth and as he was dialing he noticed that someone had left their phone book on the little shelf. He quickly looked outside but no one was around. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been such a big deal to him, but his own phone book had gotten lost at an airport, just six months before, so he was well aware of what a nuisance it was to lose your phone book. 

Rabbi Reimer looked for a name and address of the owner in the phone book, but there wasn’t one. I guess we usually keep our personal phone books at home and don’t think of them getting lost. Then he decided to play detective. He looked under M for mom and sure enough there was a phone number. It was in Florida and he was in New York, but he was hot on the trail and so he called. 

The woman who answered the phone was very suspicious. Who was he exactly? Why was he calling? Why should she give him her daughter’s phone number? But then as he explained that he was in New York, and had found a phone book, and had wanted to fulfill the mitzvah of hashavat aveidah, of returning lost property, and could she tell her daughter that he had her phone book so she wouldn’t worry, the woman began to cry.  

Now losing a phone book is a nuisance, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would cause crying like that. Eventually the woman calmed down and told him the story. She had not spoken with her daughter for three years. They had a fight and one thing led to another and she had told her daughter to get out of her house and never to come back.  She missed her daughter so much and this call just brought it all out.  

She gave Rabbi Reimer her daughter’s phone number so that he could return the phone book, but she said to him, “please wait a few minutes, let me call her first.”

The Talmud includes a whole chapter of laws about returning lost property and a number of stories of people who go to great efforts to fulfill this mitzvah, but I like Rabbi Reimer’s story the best because it makes clear the relationship of this mitzvah and the time of year this Torah portion is read.

You might wonder why we read this portion with all its rules just before the High Holidays every year. In part it’s because these rules are the character training program of the Jewish people and it is during the month of Elul that we do a personal check in and see how our own character building program is going. But with regard to the mitzvah of returning lost property it’s even a little bit more than that.

Teshuvah, repentance, is a kind of return as well. We return to God and to the best that is in us. And just as with returning lost property, we have to make an effort to find the owner, so too here do we have to make an effort to seek out those we have offended and to reconcile at this time of year. Making amends we return to them and to ourselves, a sense of dignity, self-worth, a sense of honor and of trust. An article by Rabbi Lauren Berkun, on this week’s Torah portion, reminded me about the Talmud’s mention of the special “claimant’s stone.” In ancient Jerusalem there was a special place in the city, where those who lost something and those who found something could gather and be reunited. Today there is no physical place for teshuvah, but there is a season, and that season is now.