What do telephone booths make you think of? Ancient times…. Superheroes?
Phone booths make me think of a particular superhero named Joy Cousminer, a Jewish New Yorker who founded a credit union in the South Bronx in 1970 in a phone booth. Joy was teaching single mothers for their GED, and she discovered they had no banking available. This was 1970. With no background in finance, she asked around and learned about credit unions and decided to establish one. And she didn’t wait to get a storefront – she did all the initial processing with her students in a phone booth outside the place where her classes met. When I met Joy three decades later, her bank had grown into a network of financial services supporting small businesses and education in that Bronx community.
And another superhero related to New York phone booths is a man whose name I don’t know. One day during Elul, a few weeks before Rosh Hashanah, this gentleman went into a phone booth in Manhattan to make a call, and on the little shelf beneath the phone he saw a notebook, left by a previous caller. It was a directory of phone numbers and a planner with appointments.
He thought: I’d love to find who this belongs to. But this is New York City, and who knows how many people have been in this phone booth today? Am I going to starting calling the numbers in this book until I find one whose friend happened to mention that they lost their planner? There’s really nothing I can do, so I’m just going to pretend I never saw it. So he exited the phone booth and left the notebook behind.
But as he walked away, the man remembered that there is a mitzvah in the Torah to return lost objects. In Hebrew: hashavat aveidah. And it happened to be in the parasha (Torah portion) for that very week. How am I going to live with myself when I hear these verses from the Torah in shul, if I just leave that notebook behind? So he went back to the phone booth and took the notebook. He brought it home, leafed through it in search of any useful clue, but saw nothing in its pages to indicate who it belonged to.
Finally he turned it over and on the back cover was one more phone number, and above that it said: Mom.
So he called that number. You don’t know me, but I found this directory in a phone booth – do you have a child who is living in the city? If so would you mind giving me their number? I’m a religious Jew and I want to fulfill my obligation to return their lost object. The mother said Yes, my daughter lives in the city, and gave him the number.
He called the daughter, and she was overjoyed. So much information she needed was in there — important obligations and people she knows, and she thought it was all gone forever. She came over and picked it upl happy ending.
But before the next Shabbat, the man opened his door and on his front steps he found the most beautiful arrangement of flowers, and a card in it from the young woman. So he called her again and said: Thank you, but that was so unnecessary. I was happy I could get your datebook back to you.
The young woman said: I didn’t send you the flowers because of my datebook. I sent them because of my mother.
You see, I’m Jewish like you. I didn’t grow up in a very connected home, and I recently became more observant, and this became a source of conflict with my mother. After you called her, she also called me. She said about what you did: “If that’s what it means to be a religious Jew, then now I appreciate your path and everything you are doing.” It was the first time my mom and I have spoken in years.
Rabbi Paysach Krohn tells this story because it’s about two things lost, and two things that were found in the phone booth – the physical notebook; and the treasured relationship.
This kind of thing is why it is said that one of the central mitzvot in the Torah is returning something lost – hashavat aveidah.
Returning, hashavah, is the same word as teshuvah, the returning of our souls that we are engaged in this time of year. We usually think of teshuvah as self-directed – I notice, I course-correct. But what if I don’t notice, if I’ve lost the thread? Or what if I have an idea of the course I want to get onto, but I can’t pin it down, or I just don’t believe I can get there? What if that’s the case for someone in your life?
That’s what this mitzvah is about. It’s about what we do for each other’s teshuvah, each other’s restoration. And the idea of lost objects is the essential frame for our time b’gadol, in the big picture, how we orient and how we act in a world that seems very lost.
Here is what the Torah says, in Deuteronomy chapter 22:
Do not see your brother’s ox or sheep astray and ignore them – return, yes return them to your brother. If your brother is not near to you or you do not know whose it is, take it into your house and let it be with you until your brother comes looking for it; then return it to him. V’hashevota lo. This you shall do for his donkey, and this you shall do for his garment, and this you shall do for anything lost by your brother that is lost from him but you found it – you may not ignore it.
I want to unpack this teaching with its many elements. This isn’t just about literal oxen and sheep.
An ox magnifies our strength. An ox pulls the plough – makes it possible for our fields to receive the seeds we want to plant, gives muscle to our projects in the world. An ox carries the things we need to move from one place to another but can’t do, or can’t do on our own.
A sheep is for nourishment and warmth. Sheep provide food to power us from the inside. Or we shear the wool to make the clothes that warm us, that cushion us so we can be resilient in the face of the elements.
These are why hashavat aveidah is such an important mitzvah. We all go through times when we have misplaced our ox, our energy – when we can’t find the capacity to execute something we know is important. We all go through times when we have lost our sheep – when we’re running on empty, when we feel uncovered and vulnerable, as we try to live our best lives in the face of challenges. When this happens – when we lose our ox, our sheep — we can end up losing ourselves, and wondering if we will ever find ourselves again.
And what we can do for each other, says the Torah, is to find and bring these back. Reb Mimi Feigelson quotes what Carole King and Jerry Goffin wrote for Aretha Franklin:
When my soul was in the lost and found, you came around to claim it.
I didn’t know, just what was wrong with me, ‘til your kiss helped me name it.
For the past decade I have been coming back again and again to this mitzvah and this frame, because it is an alternative to two other ways of seeing the world right now in general and the situation of the Jewish people.
There is a narrative of decline, which says that there was a high point of history when things were better and more just and now it’s only more and more in the other direction. Or some say that history goes in cycles, that the world swings like a pendulum and we’ve swung away from a time that was better for Jews and for humanity, and perhaps it will swing back later – this is a passive way of thinking.
Hashavat aveidah offers a different perspective, honest and realistic but empowering. The medieval Sefer Ha-Chinuch, which details each of the 613 mitzvot in the Torah, explains: Everything gets lost all the time, in all directions. And because of this mitzvah even when something is lost we can know it is still connected with its owner. And that awareness itself is a source of joy, even when it is still lost.
I believe that the world is not worse than before, just very disarranged. The high points of modern history, for the Jewish people or America or humanity, are not gone forever nor have they swung out of all reach. Things are just misplaced. If we can’t find them right now someone else is actually holding them.
All these things are still real and still ours:
The sense of Am Yisrael as a moral force in the world, known to ourselves and known to the world that way.
Our country as a beacon of freedom and welcome.
The unity we had after the terror of 9/11.
The solidarity among the Jewish people, in Israel and the U.S.
The alliances we have had as American Jews, banding together with other minority groups for civil rights.
The hopes and work for peace among Israelis and Palestinians.
These are all still very real. Someone is holding each and every one of them for us. There is no ideal or vision we have experienced that is not somewhere in the world, still in action, still lighting up someone’s mind. And the knowledge of that might bring us not just relief but even joy.
And the same is true for what individuals have lost hold of. The Torah says that when the owner of the lost object is far away, we are supposed to hold onto it until they come looking. Even when they are too far away to look over here and even when they have no idea where to look. The Talmud elaborates that we also have an obligation to make it easier for someone to find what they lost. To look for identifying marks, called simanim. To announce what we have that is someone’s, l’hachriz.
Reb Mimi teaches that the mitzvah of hashavat aveidah is to be “spiritual finders” for each other. Whenever any of us loses track of our greatness, other people have it and can bring it back to us.
We all carry memories, specific and lush, simanim of the people in our lives at their best. And sometimes it is our memory of them which they most need.
It’s when we can say to our beloved, to our friend, to our child: I remember this specific thing that you did, for me. This thing you said to me when I was down, and it made a difference.
When we can say to our partner: This is what I felt, what I loved, when we made our life commitment to each other.
When we can say to anyone: This is who I know you want to be, because this is how you told it to me once.
This is who I know you can be, because I can show this time when you were exactly that.
These are the announcements we are obligated to make, l’hachriz, as soon as we know we have something another has lost. This is how we help other people do teshuvah, by restoring their faith in their capacity for teshuvah.
When my soul was in the lost and found, you came around to claim it. I didn’t know, just what was wrong with me, ‘til your kiss helped me name it.
The Torah notes that sometimes the distance is far, or the person doesn’t quite know what they’ve lost. And the Talmudic tradition says that when you have an ox or a sheep or something else that is lost, it’s not enough to store it somewhere safe. You have to keep it in good working order. You have to plough with the ox you’ve found, and shear the sheep.
So when we see people losing faith or hope in our country, or in the place of the Jews within our country, people who are not ready to have those things back – that’s the time for whoever has those things to exercise them.
It would be natural to say: If others are disillusioned, maybe I should be too. The Talmud reads the Torah and says do the complete opposite – stand in for the owner. That’s why this summer, I got us a grant to eat pastry and drink coffee and read our nation’s Declaration of Independence together, in celebration of the 250th anniversary. This was a way of saying: I still believe that all are created equal, that we have unalienable rights, and that’s what this country is established for. People from our community came out to Panera, to Riverwalk. We had an interfaith group of Beth Abraham members and VFW veterans of military service, many of them Christian, here at the synagogue, and we started to explore some of our differences through the document that said we all belong here.
At a time when our country has lost its sheep, the energy to celebrate together and work for common goals, we found it here and we used it. We relived the audacity of our Founders, as they seized a moment in history and proclaimed ideas they knew were true and knew they would have to stretch to live up to. And I left each meeting feeling more nourished and more resilient as a citizen.
When our people used to go on festivals to the ancient Temple, the Beit Hamikdash, there was one particular gathering place nearby called the Finder’s Stone, the Even To’en. Literally, the Claimer’s Stone. It was a national lost-and-found. Any person who had something another had lost would come and announce it. The obligation was to bring it not just on one pilgrimage, but for the cycle of a whole festival year.
It can take more than one hearing for a person you care about to take back from you what they have lost, to believe what you believe about them. You may be here today holding again the evidence of hope for someone in your life that you brought here last year on the High Holy Days. If they have not claimed it yet, do not despair.
These holy days are the season for seeking what we have lost, and also for bringing back what people in your life are seeking or don’t even know they have lost.
It’s when we should go back to the books we read that inflated our souls at some turning point, to recapture what it was like to feel that way and to know that way. Now is a good time to pick up a history of the founding of Israel or of the civil rights movement.
It’s a time when if you remember about someone when they were your ox, helping you do something you wanted so much and couldn’t do on your own – tell them.
If you remember when someone was your sheep, warming your spirit, nourishing you when you were almost spent, tell them.
During these ten days of teshuvah, look for people whose ox you have, whose sheep you have. Call them or send a note. This is a time for being “spiritual finders.”
If it is hope for the collective, for America and for the Jewish people, for a value or a vision, whether you are seeking or have what to return, this is the place and time to call it out, so we can restore and strengthen each other. Hineni machriz, I myself announce like a shofar that I have these for you. And there are so many other people in this room who do too. I can tell you all day about Joy Cousminer, who turned a phone booth into finance for educations and small businesses that transformed lives and a community.
And I didn’t just meet her, I found her myself, at a time when I felt I had lost my own vision for myself and my teaching. If she hadn’t announced where she was, I would never have found her. I have hope because of more like her I have found from New York to New Hampshire to Jerusalem, each time I thought I had lost hope in our world or a sense of my role in it.
We will shortly say in the major prayer of the Musaf service, the Unetaneh Tokef, that God has found the notebook each of us have left behind in a phone booth. The one with all of our contacts and commitments, our people and our priorities. The list of mitzvot we did that we have lost track of. The person whose connection we have lost that we need the most.
And that prayer says that God wants to fulfill toward us God’s own mitzvah of hashavat aveidah. The Divine is opening up our notebook and looking for who it belongs to, and is overjoyed to see our own identifying signature. So that God can know who to give it back to, to help us restore our connections and our souls for the new year.
Shabbat Shalom and Shana Tova!
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