parsha bit: Ki Teitzei
This week's parsha includes laws of returning lost or forgotten
objects. The talmud tells the following story to illustrate:
Once a man was passing the home of Rabbi Chanina
ben Dosa and left some hens behind. Rabbi Chanina refused to eat
the hens' eggs, and in time the hens multiplied. When they became
too many for him to keep, he sold them and bought goats. Later the
man returned, saying he had lost his hens. Rabbi Chanina asked
for a sign to identify them, which the man provided. Rabbi Chanina
then gave him the goats. (Ta'anit 25a)
I find a few things interesting about this:
The lesson seems to be that we not only hold the lost item but, when that makes sense, increase its value. One could have reasonably argued that when the man showed up Chanina owed him a hen, but that's not what happened.
We sometimes hear stories of how someone abandoned what he was doing to search high and low for the owner of a lost item, and in fact the talmud has a lot to say about this -- that it is inconvenient to search for the owner doesn't excuse us from doing it anyway. In this story Chanina waits but doesn't search. It's possible that the rabbis go on to argue about how he didn't do enough (the talmud is big and contains many cross-references, so for all I know there's a discussion of this story in tractate sanhedrin or something), but in the discussion in this part of the talmud, Chanina is clearly considered to have done a good thing. (Those goats brought him other rewards before the man came to claim them.)
Chanina didn't just take the man's word for it; he asked for a sign. A man's word is important, but we needn't decline to ask for proof. That said, I wonder what kind of sign the man could have given, or how much proof it's appropriate to seek for a mere chicken. I commented to the rabbi this morning that I was curious about the sign, especially as the chicken was no longer there ("it had a little white spot below its beak..." or the like). He suggested that this might go to show Chanina's observance of details, that he could match a description of a long-gone hen. Another possibility occurred to me: any sign might have been good enough, and the point was to ask the man for something (on the theory that a cheat would demur rather than giving a sign that would turn out not to apply).
I find a few things interesting about this:
The lesson seems to be that we not only hold the lost item but, when that makes sense, increase its value. One could have reasonably argued that when the man showed up Chanina owed him a hen, but that's not what happened.
We sometimes hear stories of how someone abandoned what he was doing to search high and low for the owner of a lost item, and in fact the talmud has a lot to say about this -- that it is inconvenient to search for the owner doesn't excuse us from doing it anyway. In this story Chanina waits but doesn't search. It's possible that the rabbis go on to argue about how he didn't do enough (the talmud is big and contains many cross-references, so for all I know there's a discussion of this story in tractate sanhedrin or something), but in the discussion in this part of the talmud, Chanina is clearly considered to have done a good thing. (Those goats brought him other rewards before the man came to claim them.)
Chanina didn't just take the man's word for it; he asked for a sign. A man's word is important, but we needn't decline to ask for proof. That said, I wonder what kind of sign the man could have given, or how much proof it's appropriate to seek for a mere chicken. I commented to the rabbi this morning that I was curious about the sign, especially as the chicken was no longer there ("it had a little white spot below its beak..." or the like). He suggested that this might go to show Chanina's observance of details, that he could match a description of a long-gone hen. Another possibility occurred to me: any sign might have been good enough, and the point was to ask the man for something (on the theory that a cheat would demur rather than giving a sign that would turn out not to apply).