Lost and Found

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Talmud Tuesday is a gift to Shomrei from our rabbinic intern, Jacob Lipkin. From 5:30 to 6:30 pm, on alternating Tuesdays, Jacob leads a study session micro-focused on one or two paragraphs of Talmud. The class is open to all congregants, from the most knowledgeable to those who never had gazed at a page of Talmud before (that would be me).

When I arrived at last Tuesday’s session, I knew only that the Talmud applied the wisdom of our sages to parse – often excruciatingly – the ethical issues of daily Jewish life in ancient times. I assumed I’d learn a bit of what it was like to study Talmud, but I hardly expected to find relevance to my daily life in 21st Century Montclair.

How wrong I was.

Jacob introduced the session by telling us that it’s a mitzvah in Judaism to return a lost object to its owner. The monetary worth of the object is not at issue; it’s the value of restoring things to where or whom they belong. Like the vast majority of mitzvot, this one comes from Torah, not Talmud, but as we soon learned, the Talmud tunnels down quite a few rabbit holes (as we might call them today) to discern which lost items Jews are obligated to return, if we find them, and which we’re not. Jacob had selected two excerpts or sugya of Talmud to guide us on this subject. He called the session “What Makes an Object Lost?” and he emailed us the excerpts as a PDF attachment. Thus we explored this ancient question with the aid of our smart phones.

To get in the spirit, Jacob had us brainstorm objects you might lose today – your keys, a book, a jacket, your reading glasses, your car in a large parking lot. Then, objects ancient Jews might have lost – a goat (or animals, generally), gleanings from a field, a child (Joseph, in Ya’akov’s case), a robe, a pitcher.

Then it was on to Mishnah Bava Metzia 2.1, which opens, “In a case where a person discovers lost items. . . , [t]hese are the found items that belong to them.” The list that followed was fairly long, from “scattered produce” to  “unprocessed wool fleeces that are taken from their state of origin directly after shearing,” with the basic theme being that these were generic items, indistinguishable from countless others. Moreover, Jacob told us the assumption was that they were found in a large marketplace, not near a home where they could be easily traced to their owner. That is: It’s not like someone dropped a size 4 Lululemon Cerulean Blue yoga jacket on the sidewalk in front of her Montclair Victorian.

The first of the Mishnah statements about which items a finder could keep was attributed to “Rabbi Meir.” Jacob explained that when a statement in the Mishnah or Talmud is attributed to someone, that means not everyone agrees. If there was universal consensus among the sages, there would be no attribution.

As if to illustrate the point, the very next sentence delivered yet another take – although not necessarily a contradictory one. According to “Rabbi Yehuda:” “If one finds any lost item in which there is an alteration,” or an identifying feature, then the finder must “proclaim” or make public the discovery so that the owner can claim it.

We then moved on to the great debate over how to determine when an ancient Jew experienced “despair” over losing an object. In this context, the Talmud defines despair as meaning a person has given up on finding what was lost, Jacob told us. Someone may feel despair, as we define it today, over the loss of a precious object as soon as it goes missing, but the Talmud defines despair as beginning when someone gives up all hope of finding a lost object. It is at that point that the finder is no longer ethically obliged to look for the owner.

We were deep in the weeds of a debate between “Abaya” and “Rava” over the concept of “unconscious despair” – i.e. someone has lost an object but doesn’t yet realize it’s missing – when the hour ended.

In that short time, I felt that I literally had tasted the experience of ancient Talmudic discussion, which is so central to who we are as Jews. The intensity of the immersion was clear when I realized how jarred I was when a classmate engaged me in modern-day chit chat (“Have you seen ‘A Real Pain?’”) in the minutes after the class. Still, I sensed no connection between these obscure, long-ago debates and my own life. I even wondered why they mattered so much in their own time.

But then, walking silently down the stairs to the lobby, my mind set off in its own direction and soon was flooding with memories of all kinds of objects I’ve lost, of which I’ve found only a few. As I zipped my winter coat against the cold night air, I fixated on a treasured item that I lost at Shomrei – a beautiful grey wool scarf knitted for me by a beloved friend, Shirley Grill.  Shirley gave me the scarf almost exactly a year ago, and I wore it at every opportunity. One Shabbat, I hung my coat and scarf in the coat room before heading into the sanctuary. When I sought to retrieve it after kiddush, I discovered my coat hanging there without the scarf. I scoured the coat room without result. That Monday, I came to the office to ask Marjorie Steffe if anyone had turned it in. She said no, but she promised to contact me when it turned up. When, not if. How could it not?

Week after week, I asked about it, but no one had turned it in. It’s now almost a year later, and still no scarf. I am so heartbroken that I couldn’t bring myself to tell Shirley about its disappearance until this week. I didn’t want her to learn the sad news from Shomrei Week. I feel like a negligent friend for having left something so precious unattended.

Driving home through Montclair that night, I applied my first Talmud lesson to the loss of my scarf. This scarf is not a generic item, indistinguishable from others like Rabbi Meir’s “scattered produce.” It’s a painstakingly handmade scarf that matches the gray of my coat. It disappeared not at a large public market but inside Shomrei Emunah, where at most 100 people were gathered. For its exact appearance, please see the attached selfie, which I texted to Shirley on the first day I wore it.

Moreover, while I have despaired (by the modern definition) the loss of my scarf for much of the last year, I have not despaired Talmudically for even a moment. That is: I haven’t given up on finding my scarf, as this essay makes clear.

Drawing on this admittedly rudimentary Talmudic analysis, I think we can agree that this is not an item that meets our sages’ test of finders keepers. Rather, this is a textbook case of Rabbi Yehuda’s “lost item in which there is an alteration,” or distinguishing characteristic. Secondly, the owner of the lost item (that would be me) has not despaired, at least not in the Talmudic sense. Therefore, the facts obligate anyone who found my scarf to proclaim its discovery and allow me to reclaim it.

If you did find and mistakenly kept my scarf, I hope this Talmudic argument moves you to return it to me. But even if I don’t get it back, I’m grateful to have gone to Talmud Tuesday and to have studied with Jacob and fellow congregants. I had no idea what to expect, but the experience exceeded any expectations I brought to it. For me, it perfectly embodied the Boomer-generation adage (with apologies to Joni Mitchell): “Something’s lost, but something’s gained in living every day.”

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