It is a mitzvah to return a lost object to its owner. That might seem like a fairly obvious thing to do, but what’s not so obvious is why Jewish law considers returning things to be such a major mitzvah. There are eight chapters devoted entirely to lost and found in the Mishneh Torah, the comprehensive code of Jewish law by the philosopher and Rabbi Moses Maimonides.
To start with the basics, the name for this mitzvah is hashavat aveidah. Hashavat means “returning of”, from the same word as teshuvah, changing ourselves by returning, and aveidah is something lost.
The first thing you’re supposed to do when you find an item is to figure out whether it has signs that it belongs to someone else or rather the kind of thing that is easily disregarded even by someone who might have owned it. This section of the laws is fairly common sense. Look for a name or some kind of identifier, obviously. But also it makes a difference if the item has indications that it was made or assembled by someone, even if you can’t tell who at first glance. The Mishnah gives the examples of a pouch of coins, or a stack of three coins, or a loaf of bread with coins inside it, or a loaf of bread with a distinctive shape different from the typical loaf sold in the market. These look like things someone cared about, put together with intention.
If an object looks like it might belong to someone, Jewish law says to hold onto it and make a public announcement. Anyone who claims the lost item would have to tell its identifying marks; otherwise you are not obligated to give it to the person.
And here’s where the mitzvah goes beyond the obvious. There is one view in the Mishnah that you have to wait for a cycle of the three annual pilgrimage festivals to be completed before giving up finding the owner. There is a tradition that in the Second Temple in Jerusalem there was actually a lost and found, known as the Claimer’s Stone, Even To’en, where people would announce lost objects and come to look for them on the festivals. After a time, if the owner doesn’t materialize, then the owner is considered to have given up hope of finding their lost object, and the finder can keep it.
Before that time is up, the person with a lost object is obligated to take care of it. If it’s a scroll, the Mishnah says, it should be unrolled and read from each month. There are responsibilities for another person’s lost animals – the finder has to take care of them. That’s how the Torah introduces this mitzvah, by talking about animals that have wandered off (Deuteronomy 22:1-3). As you can imagine, this is itself a complicated area of Hashavat Aveidah, because there are costs that go with taking care of an animal.
Where does the spiritual force behind Hashavat Aveidah come from? One is the general Jewish concept that possession does not come with unlimited rights. Possession as often comes with obligations and limits. It’s always a covenant between us and God, and that’s even when I do own outright the thing in my possession. We are in some sense always borrowers from the Divine, even when we are not holding onto someone else’s lost item.
But we can also zero in on the two words that label this mitzvah: Hashavat Aveidah Hashavat , the returning-of, comes from the root shuv, which means to go back or return both literally and spiritually. I’ve already taught in this series about teshuvah -- going back as the central spiritual practice of reviewing our deeds, going over them, and if we did wrong and find ourselves returning to a similar situation then choosing a different action.
Lost objects remind us of our own misplaced souls, which we are always seeking and which we depend on others to bring us back to. Lost objects remind us that the world is full of good things that aren’t always where they belong. Ideas and ideals and purposes, when they are not actively being made real it’s not because they don’t exist, but just because they have wandered off, become detached from the people they belong to.
In the Torah the first avediah, the original lost item, is the Jewish people. We were lost in Egypt, away from our domain, the place where we did our essential work and were nourished. The Divine found us, cared for us in the wilderness while we were still lost, and returned us. Lost and found is the foundation of our story. The whole Exodus story is Hashavat Aveidah. So every time we stop and notice a lost object, and try to return it, we are trying to imitate the Divine.
For a deeper dive into the spiritual significance of Hashavat Aveidah, and its relationship to teshuvah, click here to read or here to listen.
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