The Case of the Lost Tefillin
I am sure many of us have had the experience of our luggage being lost by an airline. We all know that sinking feeling of waiting for our checked luggage at the luggage carousel, and one by one all of the passengers on your flight collect their luggage and leave, and you are still waiting. It is obvious the airline has misplaced your luggage. You have to through the hassle of reporting it, and usually the airline finds it and delivers it to your destination within 24 hours. Sometimes, however, the passenger and his or her luggage are, for whatever reason, never re-united. Ever wonder where lost luggage ends up? It ends up in Scottsboro, Alabama, at a Superstore called Unclaimed Baggage Center. This is a 40,000 foot “Superstore” that attracts close to one million visitors annually and employs 140 people. If an airline cannot find the owner of luggage, The Unclaimed Baggage Center buys the luggage and sells its contents to customers who shop at the store.
Most of what the store sells are things that you would expect people to travel with – clothes, electronics, books, and household items. There are also unusual items for sale at the store – car engines, moose antlers, full suits of armor to name a few. Some people apparently travel with suitcases full of cheese, vacuum packed frogs, and armadillos. The best find ever was a 5.8 carat diamond solitaire ring.
One day last year, Rabbi Uri Pilichowski was shopping in this store looking for some cheap cell phones. He came upon a very unusual find – seven pair of tefillin – sitting on a shelf in the aisle between ladies dresses and bathing suits. For those of you who might not know, tefillin or phylacteries in English, are two small black cubes containing scriptural verses written on vellum. Traditional Jews attach these cubes to themselves using leather straps, one on the arm and one on the head, during weekday morning prayers. Now, high quality tefillin like the ones Rabbi Pilichowski saw at this store can run upwards of a thousand dollars a pair! The store, however, was selling these tefillin at $45 dollars a pair. The obviously had no idea what they had, or their value.
Rabbi Pilichowski could have done one of three things at this moment. He could have seen this as a financial opportunity. He could buy these seven sets of tefillin, all in excellent condition, for $45 each and sell them to fellow Jews for between $500 and $1000 dollars apiece. He would make a killing in the tefillin market, and his buyers would have purchased quality tefillin at a discounted price. In other words, we might say, a win-win situation. Alternately, he could have simply passed them by, comfortable with the fact that the owners had probably already been compensated for their loss through the airline insurance company. He could have reasoned that they had replaced these lost tefillin with new ones long ago, and there was no point in going to the trouble of finding their owners.
Which would you have done – gone for the profit or simply moved on? Rabbi Pilichowski did neither of these. It occurred to Rabbi Pilichowski that he could neither profit from the re-sale of these tefillin nor simply ignore their existence. The Torah was clear. The mitzvah of “Hashavat Aveida”, of returning a lost object, was a commandment, not an option. “You shall not see the ox of your brother or his sheep or goat cast off and ignore them, you shall return it to your brother …. So shall you do for his garment, and so shall you do for any lost article of your brother that may become lost from him and you find it – you must not ignore it.” Rabbi Pilichowski resolved to try to return these valuable religious articles to their owners, in keeping with this mitzvah found in our Torah reading this week. He bought the seven pair of tefillin for $45 each and set off to find their owners.
But how does one do that? These tefillin could belong to anyone in the world! When I was a child there was a section in the local newspaper in the classified ads called “Lost and Found”. I doubt if that exists anymore. Even if it did, which newspapers should he advertise in? The owners of these tefillin could be anywhere in the world! He decided to post photos of each pair on Facebook, explaining that he was looking for the owners. Within hours the post had been shared 2000 times. In a matter of days he was able to find the owners of six of the seven pair of Tefillin and return them.
One pair was not found through Facebook. It had a tag inside of the Tefillin bag with the name “Malka”. Rabbi Pilichowski had once attended a Passover Seder in Ukraine with someone with that name. “How many people have that last name?” he reasoned. So he reached out to this person, who he knew was now living in Los Angeles. Yossi Malka, 37, immediately confirmed that he had lost Tefillin during a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina. The tefillin had belonged to his father, David Malka, who died several months earlier at age 58 from pancreatic cancer. Before he died, he bequeathed his cherished Tefillin to his oldest grandson, Abie, who would be soon celebrating his bar mitzvah. Needless to say, the family was devastated by the loss of this precious family heirloom, and overjoyed to have it returned.
Our sages ask, why is it even necessary to have a commandment in the Torah to return a lost object? Isn’t it obvious that we should do so? Doesn’t this fall under common human decency? How could one even think of keeping something one has found that belongs to someone else? The answer they give is that a commandment is necessary to overcome both the greed that might lead a person to keep a valuable object they found, or the inertia that tempts one to just put the lost object away and do nothing about it. Human beings can be lazy. We might just ignore a lost object to avoid the trouble involved in returning it. Was Rabbi Pilichowski the first Jewish person who saw those tefillin in the store and recognized them for what they were? Highly unlikely! But everyone else looked at them with curiosity and just walked by. Everyone else looked the other way. Rabbi Pilichowsky, however, felt that it was his obligation under Torah law to at least try to return these lost items to their proper owners.
May the example of Rabbi Pilichowsky motivate each of us to do the right thing when we come upon a lost object. It may mean more to the owner, and to us, than we could ever imagine.[1]
Shabbat Shalom
[1] I am grateful to Rabbi Jack Reimer for suggesting this topic and for guiding me to the news article in the New York Daily News dated July 3, 2014, which gave the account upon which this sermon is based.
