Q&A: A Guard Who Thinks He Loses Out by Returning Lost Property. Exempt?
A Guard Who Thinks He Loses Out by Returning Lost Property. Exempt?
Question
I currently work as a private guard.
People hire me and pay me a daily rate to watch over Palestinian workers who are renovating their homes, for the duration of the workday. [They pay about 500 shekels a day, give or take.]
[In Judea and Samaria the regulations require this, and of course it is much more worthwhile than paying Israeli workers, certainly Jewish ones.] Some of them are really not happy to pay for a guard who, in their view, does nothing, but they are forced to pay because of the regulation [and in many cases their attitude toward the guard reflects that].
There are guards who, because of the way the homeowners treat them [it is truly disgraceful], provide security and nothing more, take their pay, and that’s it.
But I take initiative [I understand a bit about construction supervision, a field I worked in in the past] and I point out defects or stages where the workers cut corners [and I have already saved homeowners damages of tens of thousands of shekels, with no exaggeration at all]. I also keep an eye out beyond the security aspect [for example, warning about theft or damage caused by the workers], or help with logistics and organization that have nothing at all to do with security guarding, but come from experience accumulated over many projects.
Of course, I do all this with no extra pay.
Surely the Rabbi will not be surprised that I am badly harmed by this and lose shifts—not despite taking initiative, but because of it. There is also a tendency on the part of homeowners to push off the guard and delay his wages, and sometimes even never pay at all. This happens to me much more than to my fellow guards who have what is called a “small head,” meaning they do the bare minimum.
I’m not a psychologist, but those are the facts, contrary to logic and common sense.
So now my question is:
Am I, in such a situation [where I am endangering my livelihood], exempt from the commandment of returning lost property?
For example [a true story]: if during my security rounds I see a worker being negligent in installing the pipes in the kitchen [not putting in rubber gaskets; there will definitely be leaks, and within a few years the whole kitchen wall will be full of leakage, foul-smelling and rotten, and it will be hidden so no one will know why—then everything will need to be torn out and rebuilt, with damages of tens if not hundreds of thousands of shekels], may I ignore it? [From experience, the homeowner yells at the contractor about the negligence, and within a few days I’m fired, though under another pretext, because the contractor makes sure to demand that the homeowner replace me. The homeowners in this case have a “small head”… it’s easy to replace a guard, hard to replace a contractor.] Or if workers steal a new bicycle, or if I straighten something out in the work arrangements and precisely because of that the homeowners tend to see the guard as some kind of sucker whose wages it is permissible to delay or withhold entirely?
True, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but homeowners, by their bad treatment specifically of guards who save them, are inviting this ignoring, this “small head,” this looking the other way. I do not behave that way toward people who save me.
Am I allowed to look the other way?
Answer
This is a very difficult question. On the face of it, you do have an obligation of returning lost property, and on the other side there is only a concern that maybe they will fire you. And even so, in order not to violate a prohibition, one must spend all his money. Still, it is possible that if the concern is very significant in your judgment, perhaps there is room to permit looking the other way, since the one firing you is the very person whose loss you are preventing. If it were someone else, there would be less room for that. Of course, when it is a defect that could lead to danger to life, then not.
Discussion on Answer
How do we know that returning lost property applies to preventing damage, and not only to a lost object like an ox?
And another point: what about the exemption of “yours comes first” — if returning the lost property would take so much of the finder’s time that he would lose more money than the value of the lost item itself, he is exempt from returning it. And presumably the same would apply to someone who loses money and not only time.
That is explicit in the Talmud. See, for example, Bava Metzia 31a, about the obligation to build a barrier against water.
As for the loss to the finder, I addressed that in my answer. If it were clear that he would lose out, then certainly he would not be required to do it. But here it is only a concern.
It may be that the distinction I made between the sources of the loss (whether it is the owner of the lost property or someone else) is in truth less significant. Still, there is a difference.
I just now saw an article about the obligation to pass on financial information: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://asif.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/18-4-1.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiXy4fr4pj7AhUChf0HHXYRDG8QFnoECBkQAQ&usg=AOvVaw197Qv2dGIjoWUPC_-Ac4vr
Though I haven’t read it.
Would it be permissible to stipulate with the moshav that it compensate the person returning the item for the damage / lost profit caused to him as a result of returning the lost property (as a condition for carrying out the return)?
Yes.
https://www.yeshiva.org.il/midrash/9334
Oren, your suggestion is sweet,
but not practical in the reality of guard work.
Apparently it’s been a long time since you met nice people in the middle of renovations.
The house is a mess, they don’t have peace of mind for anything,
they almost always want much more than what their pocket can afford,
they’re stressed and become half animal, half human.
The animal half is directed at the guard and at anything that seems unnecessary to them.
The human half is directed at the contractor, the designer, etc.
Of course, that’s not everyone,
but quite a few become like that.
Even though in day-to-day life they are nice, humane, and intelligent.
The verse “He who increases knowledge increases pain” was written about guards who understand and have learned about construction.
Someone who understands sees problems and corner-cutting. (With my own eyes I saw a concrete pour without anchor bars for fastening — an immediate danger to life. Even though they told the supervisor that it of course had anchor bars… and of course the supervisor is not on site every day, certainly not everywhere on the site all the time.)
But the guard who doesn’t understand the subject has a better life.
He guards security, and nobody has complaints against him or expectations of him, and nobody looks to get rid of him.
He works shifts and earns his bread peacefully.
That is what the verse means: “He who increases knowledge increases pain.”
A similar story happened to my brother, may he live a good long life, who was a schoolteacher [certified, with credentials, relatively rare in his community], devoted and very successful.
He managed the students excellently, disciplined them pleasantly, created a positive classroom climate, and had excellent coverage and understanding.
The children were happy, the parents praised him, and everyone was pleased.
Because word got out so positively about him, he became a sought-after teacher in his town; principals practically fought over him.
But he also knows how to read numbers.
One day he noticed that in fact the principal was simply cheating all the teachers out of a few hundred shekels every month through sophisticated deception.
Instead of staying quiet, or going to the principal and arranging that at least they would stop stealing from him, he demanded that the principal stop robbing all the teachers. The principal refused, and he stirred up the teachers over it.
Needless to say, at the end of the year he was fired. Other principals in town would not take the whistleblower. The “friend” teachers did not back him against the thieving principal, and in the end he remained at home without a livelihood.
In my humble opinion, in the reality of such a corrupt society—certainly in a nation that appoints for itself a leader who is indicted for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust—there is no moral obligation to expose corruption and defects if there is a reasonable chance you will be harmed. And halakhically too, there is no obligation.
All this was written about a defect you already know about. But if you focus on guarding and do not get involved in supervision, that is of course your right.