Hashavat Aveidah. This mitzvah — to return lost objects to their owners —appears in this week’s parsha (Deuteronomy 22) as well as in Parashat Mishpatim and is the subject of much detailed halakhic discussion among the rabbis. While not taking away from the concrete aspect of the mitzvah, I want to offer an additional, more personal, psychological reading.
Returning is a big deal to us. Here we are, in the season of return, teshuva, thinking about how to return — to God, to ourselves, to something prior, already in us.
There is also the Messianic return that we all pray for, a return of exiles to the Holy Land and a return of God’s presence to dwell among us, an ingathering of people and God, perhaps a return to the perfect harmony of the Garden of Eden, our first place of banishment.
So returning looms large in our collective consciousness. Surely the returning of lost objects is connected in some way to this larger context of return.
Indeed, the Torah describes the lost possessions in our parsha — a sheep or an ox are the examples — as nidahim. This word is usually translated here as “gone astray” as one would imagine a sheep would do, but the word normally bears the meaning of banished, exiled, thrust away, cast out or neglected. Isaiah 27:13 describes a future day when the exiled will all return from Assyria and Egypt, and it uses the term nidahim, meaning “those who have been cast out.”
So in the hoped-for future of Isaiah there will ultimately be a return of the nidahim, those who have been cast out, and here, in our parsha, there is a mitzvah of beginning to do that work ourselves, to return the nidahim.
What is this work? What is it that has been lost and needs returning? What needs returning — and maybe this is also part of the process of teshuva — are the lost parts of ourselves, the parts that have been cast out and exiled (IFS therapy actually calls them “exiles”) over the years.
The Torah says here that the first task is to see these lost parts and not hide them from yourself, not ignore them and cover them over (vehitalamta), as we normally do. The first task is to really see them and acknowledge their existence. These are parts that are well-hidden and we are adept at ignoring them, so that seeing them is a task in and of itself. It is also a relief. Parts that have been ignored and exiled — when they experience a little bit of light and attention — there is already a relaxing that takes place. So it makes sense that the first job in returning them is simply to see them.
What are these exiled parts of us and how did they get cast out? The Torah hints here at the back story. Just before this mitzvah of return is the mitzvah of the ben sorer umoreh, the defiant and rebellious son (Deuteronomy 21: 18-21). The instruction here, which, according to the rabbis, was never actually carried out, is that parents who are unable to control their adolescent, bring the child to the elders of the town where he is stoned for being rebellious and defiant and for being a glutton and a drunkard. This is, in a way, a description of the socialization process of all children. The parts of them that are considered anti-social — their rebellious, self-centered and needy parts– get stoned and eliminated in order to allow the children to function in society. Otherwise, they might end up committing crimes worthy of the death penalty, Rashi explains, pointing to the connection between this mitzvah and the one that follows (about not leaving the corpse of a criminal hanging overnight). In other words, there is some necessary curbing that happens in child-raising, in order to ensure proper socialization.
But there is a price. Often, the baby is thrown out with the bath water. Rebelliousness and defiance of authority are also tied to qualities of strength, courage, independence of thought, assertiveness, and an ability to seek truth and justice. A large appetite — being a glutton and a drunkard without limits — is also related to having joie de vivre, enthusiasm, and a kind of freedom and abandon and ability to live in the moment. There is also in this large hunger a deep neediness which is the essence of human nature, a kind of vulnerability and openness and even generosity. So all that socialization, the need to control and discipline and curb these parts, makes us lose essential pieces of ourselves. Inhibition and worry about discipline and pleasing authority take over so that there is also a loss of innocence and genuineness, the kind of purity of love expressed by a young child without pretense or thought of how it will be received.
So that is how some of our most precious parts are lost. A story is told about a child who had a dog that she played with and loved very much. The dog, however, made a mess of the house and pooped one too many times on the parents’ best carpet so that first the dog was relegated to the outdoors, and eventually was banished altogether from the home. The child mourned the dog for a long time but after a while forgot about its existence, until one day, walking along the road, the child encounters the dog, dirty and old and uncared for, and recognizes this old friend and begins to clean the dog up and bring the dog back into her life. It is the same with parts; some of the sweetest, most innocent ones, were just too messy for the world to deal with when we were young, and so they got thrown out and we forgot about them. But they are still there, like the Torah’s cast out sheep, wondering around, looking for a home inside us. The mitzvah of returning lost items is the mitzvah of returning these exiled and abandoned aspects of ourselves back into our own homes, our selves.
The process of return can be slow. The Torah says that sometimes the distance to the owner will be far and it will take time until he comes to retrieve his lost item. The rabbis use the term ye’ush, despair, to refer to how a person sometimes feels about a lost item; he gives up hope of ever having it back and so he does not actively seek it. Returning lost parts is much the same. There can be despair at the possibility of return. It may take a long time to even begin to see the part again and believe in the possibility of reintegrating it. .
But this process of returning lost parts, though slow, is redemptive, healing work; it is a kind of teshuva. We are bringing back in that which was exiled and lost, and thereby returning ourselves to our original wholeness. All parts of ourselves are gifts from God. We are only whole when they are all restored. The world is only whole and redeemed when we are all whole. Kabbalistically there is a notion that God Himself is in exile from certain parts of Himself and that our role in this world is to help God reunite those parts. As beings with the divine image inside us, we do that — we contribute to God’s own wholeness — by returning and bringing home the nidahim, those that have been cast out of our own selves.
Photo by cottonbro at Pexels
