The Day Your Brother Stops Looking

About This Talk

Chapter 13 lays out the machinery of return: the finder announces his find by category and never by its marks, because distinctive marks are the test a claimant has to pass, and a known deceiver must bring witnesses instead; rival claimants who describe an object identically leave it in the finder's hands, length beats width and weight beats both, and the announcement that once ran through three pilgrimage festivals moved into the synagogues after the destruction and then down to a word among neighbors once violent men began claiming that all lost property belongs to the king. An unclaimed object stays with the finder until Elijah comes, and because the mitzvah itself is his wage he holds it as a paid watchman, liable for loss and theft but not for accident, and obligated to keep it fit: shaking out a woolen garment every thirty days, using wooden vessels so they do not rot, copper for hot but never on the fire, silver only cold, leaving gold and glass and linen untouched, reading or rolling a scroll monthly, wearing found tefillin after appraisal, and feeding a found animal on a clock of twelve months, three months, thirty days or three days before selling it in front of a court; proceeds of that sale he may use as a loan and is therefore liable even for accident, while found money he may not use at all, and by rabbinic decree he recovers his feed costs and never swears about the find. Chapter 14 supplies the hinge, which is ye'ush, the owner's despair: marks plus an owner who still seeks are what bind the finder, so an unmarkable nail or needle belongs to the finder once the owner knows it is gone, anything lost at sea or where most people are gentiles is despaired of from the moment it fell, coins carry no reliable marks at all, and despair the owner does not yet know he has is no despair, so lifting a coin from a man who has not noticed violates one positive and two negative commandments and handing it back later counts only as a gift; an unmarked object beside a marked one means both are announced, and a long familiar utensil is announced because a refined sage may recognize it without a mark. Chapter 15 asks whether a thing fell or was set down: a placed object may not be touched even in doubt and may not be put back once taken, and the rest is a lesson in reading position, from grazing animals and overturned gear and a cow facing the city, to knotted doves and buried utensils, to baker's loaves against a household's bread, to sealed jugs that identify nothing in the season when every seal matches, to deliberate oddities like a coin baked into a loaf, to a kav of grain spread over four cubits, berries made repulsive by the dust, wind blown dates that an orphan cannot waive, a cat too dangerous to be owned, and a chick that cannot have hopped more than fifty cubits from its dovecote.