On Jewish morality and hypocrisy

Why is moral obligation not a matter of agreements? Doesn't morality have a human being's share in the place? So that the moment he allows you to harm him, then the moral prohibition disappears?

I did not say that there is no forgiveness for a moral obligation, although that may also be true. I said that your permission to do the same to me does not permit you to do something immoral to me. A person can allow the whole world not to restore his losses to him, and that does not exempt him from restoring losses to others.

On the 8th of Elul, 5722

The mitzvah of Shabbat Avidah in the Torah, which prohibits ignoring the lost object, but rather taking it and searching for the lost one by announcing it, and in the meantime committing to safeguarding the object even if years pass before the lost one is found – is not included in the Seven Commandments of the Noahide. This is a mitzvah that the Torah imposed only on the Israelites out of the obligation of solidarity with ’your brother’.

In the reality that existed in the days of Chazal, it was clear that a Gentile would not bother to return a lost object to either a Jew or his own people, and therefore even an object found in a city with a majority of Gentiles – is presumed to have been lost by the owner, who had given up on it and was a traitor. There were places where the monarchy established that ‘everything lost belongs to the king’, that the loss, like an abandoned object – became the king's property.

But the idea that the finder would go and look for the lost one in order to return his loss, was a delusional Jewish idea, suitable for a crazy people who are willing to spend more than a seventh of their lives idle. Only such idlers have time to look for the lost one in order to return his loss 🙂

The personal example of the Jews and their lofty moral leadership, which led them, among other things, to return losses to their Gentile neighbors, even before the law – led to the partial acceptance of the Bible and some of its religious and moral values among the world's culture, and as part of this trend, the value of returning a lost item was also partially absorbed.

The obligation of the foundling to stop his life and collect the lost item and search for the lost person, of course, would not even occur to them today *). The universal human requirement today is that if you want to take the lost item – bring it to the nearest police station, where the item will wait for you for several months, and if the lost person does not arrive – the foundling will be entitled to it.

Apparently, this obligation also applies today to the loss of a Gentile, both from the perspective of ‘Dina de Malchuta’ and from the perspective that today the lost Gentile does not despair, since there is a chance that the foundling will bring the item to the police. In the case of a Gentile loss, it turns out that after the three-month wait, the foundling will be entitled to the loss as ’Dina de Malchuta’. In contrast to the loss of a Jew – It seems on the surface that the obligation to declare and preserve the loss will not expire after three months, and he will continue to be a ‘keeper of the loss’ until he finds his brother who lost it

With blessings, Menashe Barkai Buch-Treger

*) In some modern legal systems, a person is not allowed to stop his life even to save the life of his friend! Such is, for example, the English law that the State of Israel inherited from the Mandate. Until Rabbi Hanan Porat, who, as a MK, initiated a change in the law that requires a person to save the life of another.