Community Blog

Shabbat Shalom, and welcome to all our guests! This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Ki Teitze, in which we find more laws than in any other parasha in the whole Torah, even the one named “Laws”. Among the lists of commandments in this portion are the rules regarding returning lost objects. This might seem mundane, but how we relate to concepts of property and care for other people’s possessions is a crux of social order, and there is an entire tractate of Talmud (that is, there are volumes of the foundational compendium of Jewish law written between the year 50 and 500 CE) on the topic. Deuteronomy 22 opens with the commandment to return any lost items found. It lists a few examples of potential lost items, details how you should hold it for the owner if you aren’t sure who the owner is or how to return it to them, and even how to ensure you don’t “return” it to a deceiver trying to steal an item which never belonged to them in the first place.

The Talmud elaborates that there are some cases in which the person who found the item did their due diligence but the item was never claimed and there was no identification to trace it back to an owner. In such cases, the property becomes “hefker” - property declared ownerless. At that point, it is up to the local rabbinic court or authority to determine what to do with the property. This rabbinic authority has decided that the items left in our “Lost and Found” box for over two years will be donated to the ACTS thrift store, along with our regular food drive this time of year for ACTS and Serve. So, please, if you have clothing items at home to add to the reappropriated Lost-and-Found-Now-Donation-Collection Box, please bring them to the synagogue any time between now and Yom Kippur, as well as your non-perishable food donations.

The Jerusalem Talmud, which we reference far less often as fewer ancient manuscripts of it existed by the time the Jewish law codes of the Middle Ages were written and so were based on the Babylonian Talmud (for example, we have about 120 pages preserved on the topics of “Damages” and property law from the Jerusalem rabbis; we have about 400 pages preserved from the Babylonian rabbis), has a story about the nature of a society that rules according to these Torah values:

Alexander the Great came to the king of Katzya, and was shown much silver and gold. Said he: “I didn’t come to see your silver and gold; I came to see your laws and customs.” As they were sitting, two people came for litigation before the king. Said one of them: “My master, the king! I purchased a ruin from my friend. I demolished it and found a hidden treasure inside it. So I said to him: ‘Take your treasure. I purchased a ruin, not a treasure.’”

And the other one said: “Just as you fear the punishment for theft, so do I. I sold you the ruin and everything in it—from the depths of the earth to the heights of heaven!”

The king summoned one of them and asked him: “Do you have a son?” Said he: “Yes.” He then summoned the second one and asked him: “Do you have a daughter?” Said he: “Yes.” Said the king to them: “Let them marry each other, and the treasure shall belong to the two of them.”

Alexander was amazed. Said the king to him: “Did I not rule well?” Said he: “No, you did not.” Said he: “If such a case came before you in your country, what would you do?” Said he: “I’d cut off both their heads, and send the treasure to the royal palace.”

Said the king of Katzya to Alexander: “Does the sun shine in your country?”

Said Alexander: “Yes.” “And do rains fall upon you?” “Yes.” “Perhaps there are cattle and herds in your land?” “Yes, there are,” said Alexander.

“By my life!” said king of Katzya. “It is for the sake of the cattle and herds that the sun shines for you and the rains fall upon you . . .”

This parable demonstrates so much about the values of mythical Katzya: it is a place ruled by a fair and pious king; it is a place with citizens concerned with righteousness and fair property rights; it is a place where Torah values of community, justice, and lawfulness are celebrated and where those values are symbiotic. Too often, our secular society does not celebrate these values in equal measure, and the skewed ways in which we view these values often leads to “law and order” feeling juxtaposed against “[social] justice” rather than having our laws reflect a system of righteous justice. 

Further on in this Torah portion, Deuteronomy 25 says: “When there is a dispute between persons and they go to law, and a decision is rendered declaring the one in the right and the other in the wrong, if the guilty one is to be flogged, the magistrate shall have the person lie down and supervise the giving of the lashes, by count, as warranted by the offense. The guilty one may be given up to forty lashes, but not more, lest being flogged further, to excess, your peer be degraded before your eyes.” While flogging seems inhumane to us now, it was the way of the world at the time of the Biblical recording, and in its context, this punishment was more gentle than many others in the ancient world. The idea implicit in these verses is that there is a finite amount of punishment for the guilty, and once they have undergone it, they are immediately reintegrated into society. We can’t know exactly how this played out in the Biblical era, but it seems that even the ancient rabbis, committed to upholding the laws of Torah as they understood them after the cataclysmic destruction of the center of Jewish life in Jerusalem, were hesitant to rule too quickly or punish too harshly. Property law, being a category of non-violent crime, required the criminals to pay restitution along with returning the stolen object or its value, but it also encouraged reconciliation and never sought to separate out the offender. In cases of violent crime, there was obviously much more concern about the offender having access to further victims, but there was also still a lot of concern about the offender’s humanity. There were “sanctuary cities” where someone accused of manslaughter could stay until the courts were ready to try and convict them, thereby separating the offender from the victim without imprisoning someone who has not yet been convicted of any crime. The rabbis put barrier upon barrier around the ability to sentence someone to death. It wasn’t outlawed, it was just made so difficult that it would never happen accidentally to an innocent person, or a person with more nuanced circumstances regarding the crime.  

This Shabbat marks anniversaries for the 1971 Attica Prison Uprising, the 2016 national prison strikes, and the 2018 prison strikes, the last of which got almost no media coverage. Despite the legal precedent of the biblical law, upon which so much of Western civilization morality is supposedly based, and despite the ongoing efforts of incarcerated people, their families, and their advocates, the prison industrial complex in this country continues to over punish property and drug crimes (which also have the highest rates of recidivism), hand down oppressive sentences with few resources for the incarcerated to ever reintegrate into society, and disproportionately incarcerate people of color. 

Jewish law in its many iterations of the last three thousand years has shown utmost concern to true justice over punishment. This time of year is known as the season of teshuvah (repentance) because of our upcoming High Holy Days focused on the process of atoning for our sins. But every day is a day for teshuvah, and the Bible and Talmud are both clear that once teshuvah has been done, the sin is wiped clean, and there should be no further bars against a person for their prior wrongdoings. There are discussions in legal texts about how too harsh a punishment will turn a person’s heart bitter and away from teshuvah. Restitution must fit the crime, and there must be pathways toward improvement for the one who commits the crime, as this will inevitably lead to improvements in society as a whole. 

I could talk for hours and give countless examples of where justice has been corrupted in our legal and law enforcement practices in this country, but one example is fresh on my mind this week. I heard about a crime committed in 1997, but some of the circumstances reflect the same issues the strikes over the last 6 years were still fighting for. In 1997, a Boy Scout murdered his family. He was convicted and given several life sentences. As someone with no chance of ever reintegrating into society, the prison system does not offer him any of the already paltry services it offers some others in prison - educational options, mental healthcare, etc. It makes sense from a certain standpoint, why invest in someone who can’t use those investments to give back to the society? Except that incarcerated people are still human and deserve more than to stare at walls all day. We also already spend over $70 billion dollars on prisons anyway, which as I said are mostly filled with non-violent criminals that probably don’t need to be there for so long in the first place, so smart investing in our population is not actually a value for the U.S. Congress. Now let’s also factor in the nuances of this particular case. This was a boy who was abused in many horrible ways for many years by his Scout Master, who eventually told him to kill his parents rather than expose his “relationship” with the older man. The boy was mentally broken-down and brainwashed by his abuser, and did as he was told. I understand that awareness of how much trauma changes the human brain may have been different in 1997. But by the 2016 prison strikes asking for things like better educational services and mental healthcare, it seems reasonable that those programs could have been expanded. They still haven’t been, at least not across the board. The former Boy Scout is still in prison and still hasn’t received the therapy he would need to ever really deal with the crimes he commited and the crimes that were done to him. The only reason the case is being reinvestigated and was the source of a news story that I discovered, is due to a lot of activism on the part of other family members of the other victims of the same Scout Master who understand the level of trauma the boys endured. That means even if he does get the resources he needs and deserves, it will only be a singular circumstance, and not real justice for the system. 

I think Prince William County is a real family-oriented community, and that the values here reflect a lot of the values of the Torah and Talmud. Despite its lack of ritual Jewish resources, it’s a great place to be the rabbi, and I love my role in community connections as well as faith leader here at Ner Shalom. I don’t share these concerns over law and justice as an indictment of anyone here, but rather to say that there is more work for us all to do to ensure that more communities look like ours. If we can have law enforcement officers and local legislators we can trust here, every neighborhood in every city in this country can have that, but currently that is simply not the case. Humanity is interconnected, and it is our duty to help lift each other up, fix broken systems, and repair the world to be a better reflection of the values of fairness, righteousness, equality and equity, community, justice, and lawfulness. May we see that world come together, and may we be a part of building a better future for all. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.