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Over the past couple of months, my family and I have become the human equivalent of St. Anthony medallions. This is admittedly a weird metaphor for me, a believing Jew and rabbi, to use about myself. Yet, how else to explain my eerily recurrent experience? Let me illustrate.

First, while with me at a local supermarket, my youngest daughter saw that a man using the store's ATM had left behind a twenty dollar bill. We ran after him to return the bill. Then, after eating ice cream in a restaurant with my daughter, I noticed that the waitress had forgotten to charge us for an item. I pointed this out to her and she corrected our bill. Finally, after returning from a shopping trip, I realized that the cashier had accidentally placed a bracelet lying on the store counter in my bag with the items I had purchased. I returned the items to the owner of the store.

Has God granted me, of all people, the power to find and return the lost possessions of others? I'm the man who is still late to meetings because I leave my car keys in places no archaeologist could unearth. Ultimately, I am forced to admit that my role as finder of lost things possesses none of the spiritual glamour that I might attach to it. Stuff happens, and lost stuff is thrown into the space between our awareness and our sleepy distraction quite randomly. 

Nonetheless, a lucky streak of three "finds" gives me pause to consider what it teaches me. My faith and moral code compel me to return what I find or to make good on what I find missing, when possible. 

However some - perhaps many - people would take this lost property, justifying their behavior with the letter-of-the-law equivalent of finders-keepers-losers-weepers: if you are unlucky enough to lose or misplace your property and I find it, it becomes mine, especially since, technically, I did not steal it.

I am not an expert in the study of law and ethics, but I know when I have entered the murky realm of borderline dishonesty. This is behavior that cannot definitively be called theft and that is not as blatantly dishonest as the argument that stealing is only stealing if you get caught. Yet, the logic of this version of finders-keepers is equally dangerous because of the exploitative impulses underlying it, and the rationales we use when we act upon those impulses. 

If I can rationalize taking your lost things because of your frailty or temporary disability I will have no problem justifying benefiting from your misfortune in other instances. This kind of thinking finds its oldest, ugliest cultural expression in the insidious, elitist claim that if I have power and wealth and you don't, each of us deserves exactly what he or she gets. 

We need to leave the overhaul of society's institutionalized selfishness to our new government. 

However, we have to begin that transformation through how we treat one another. Charity may begin at home, but so do meanness and exploitation. As we begin a painful period of national recovery and healing, our greatest challenges as individuals are to recognize when we are giving a pass to exploitative behavior, and to act on our noblest, not our nastiest, impulses.

(Dan Ornstein is rabbi of Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY.)[[In-content Ad]]

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