The Wine You Poured Out

About This Talk

These three chapters are one long argument about what an unasked kindness is worth, and they answer it three different ways. Chapter 10 finishes the law of seized property, ruling that a field a violent official took over a genuine debt and sold on cannot be expropriated from the buyer where the owner conceded the claim, two witnesses confirmed it, or a ruler sat who could have been petitioned and was not, and that whoever buys cheap from an oppressor a house signed over under duress owes the original owner a quarter of the land or a third of the funds, ten zuz back on a purchase of thirty, or that quarter is held as robbery; it then turns to the uninvited improver, who is paid what a person would give to have trees planted where the field was fit for them and judged at a disadvantage where it was not, who may be told to uproot and go but may not uproot on his own initiative since that weakens the land, who is treated under the geonim's ruling as planting in fit ground when he builds in a courtyard, who is judged at an advantage if he entered with permission or if the owner afterward completes the work or guards it, and who collects nothing until he swears to his expenses holding a sacred object unless he asks the judges to price the wood, stone, mortar and wages at the lowest standard. Chapter 11 makes return a command rather than a courtesy: one positive commandment and, for keeping a find, two negatives, binding even where the owner eats forbidden food for pleasure; an idolater's lost article may be kept yet returning it to sanctify God's name is praiseworthy and becomes obligatory where keeping it would desecrate that name, and his own accounting error may be used but never caused and only after saying out loud that you rely on his figures. The duty lapses for what is lost to all men at sea or in a flooding river, for less than a p'rutah, for property deliberately discarded such as a tossed wallet or an untied cow in a doorless shed which still may not be taken, for a find in a mostly gentile city's thoroughfare or market, and for an elder whose dignity would not have retrieved his own; but once a finder spurs the animal he is bound, returns it a hundred times if it bolts a hundred times, keeps it until it is secure in the owner's domain, returns it against his father's instruction, and must even build a barrier against floodwater heading for a neighbor's field, since all lost articles of your brother's includes his land. Chapter 12 prices the rescue: your own loss comes first, over your neighbor's and your father's and your teacher's; abandon a hundred zuz donkey to save one worth two hundred and you collect only a fit wage, and a dinar of forgone work earns you an idled worker's rate unless you stipulated to the owner or before a court; pour out your wine to catch spilling honey and you are paid a wage, demand half the honey while carrying empty jars and the agreement is treated as facetious because you caused yourself no loss, and a fugitive pays a boatman the fare while a fisherman told to stop fishing collects the whole promised dinar. Where an armed force takes a caravan's goods the rescuer keeps what the owners could not have saved, returns what they could have, and keeps what was savable only with difficulty if he declared he was acting for himself, words that likewise dissolve a partnership or end an employment; ransom is apportioned by the value of each man's goods and not by the head, jettisoned cargo by weight and not value, and a man who lost his donkey is given another rather than cash, since nobody guards two the way he guards one.