(כא) נֶ֚פֶשׁ כִּ֣י תֶחֱטָ֔א וּמָעֲלָ֥ה מַ֖עַל בַּיהֹוָ֑ה וְכִחֵ֨שׁ בַּעֲמִית֜וֹ בְּפִקָּד֗וֹן אֽוֹ־בִתְשׂ֤וּמֶת יָד֙ א֣וֹ בְגָזֵ֔ל א֖וֹ עָשַׁ֥ק אֶת־עֲמִיתֽוֹ׃ (כב) אֽוֹ־מָצָ֧א אֲבֵדָ֛ה וְכִ֥חֶשׁ בָּ֖הּ וְנִשְׁבַּ֣ע עַל־שָׁ֑קֶר עַל־אַחַ֗ת מִכֹּ֛ל אֲשֶׁר־יַעֲשֶׂ֥ה הָאָדָ֖ם לַחֲטֹ֥א בָהֵֽנָּה׃ (כג) וְהָיָה֮ כִּֽי־יֶחֱטָ֣א וְאָשֵׁם֒ וְהֵשִׁ֨יב אֶת־הַגְּזֵלָ֜ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר גָּזָ֗ל א֤וֹ אֶת־הָעֹ֙שֶׁק֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׁ֔ק א֚וֹ אֶת־הַפִּקָּד֔וֹן אֲשֶׁ֥ר הׇפְקַ֖ד אִתּ֑וֹ א֥וֹ אֶת־הָאֲבֵדָ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר מָצָֽא׃ (כד) א֠וֹ מִכֹּ֞ל אֲשֶׁר־יִשָּׁבַ֣ע עָלָיו֮ לַשֶּׁ֒קֶר֒ וְשִׁלַּ֤ם אֹתוֹ֙ בְּרֹאשׁ֔וֹ וַחֲמִשִׁתָ֖יו יֹסֵ֣ף עָלָ֑יו לַאֲשֶׁ֨ר ה֥וּא ל֛וֹ יִתְּנֶ֖נּוּ בְּי֥וֹם אַשְׁמָתֽוֹ׃
(21) When a person sins and commits a trespass against the LORD by dealing deceitfully with his fellow in the matter of a deposit or a pledge, or through robbery, or by defrauding his fellow, (22) or by finding something lost and lying about it; if he swears falsely regarding any one of the various things that one may do and sin thereby— (23) when one has thus sinned and, realizing his guilt, would restore that which he got through robbery or fraud, or the deposit that was entrusted to him, or the lost thing that he found, (24) or anything else about which he swore falsely, he shall repay the principal amount and add a fifth part to it. He shall pay it to its owner when he realizes his guilt.
~~~
Talmud Bavli Gittin 55a
And about a stolen beam that was built into a large building, [the victim] receives the value [of the beam but not the beam itself] due to an ordinance for the penitent…
The Sages taught: one who stole a beam and built it into a building, Beit Shammai say: destroy the entire building and return the beam to its owners. And Beit Hillel say: only the value of the beam, due to an ordinance instituted for the sake of the penitent.
QUESTIONS:
Talmud Bavli Sukka 31a
Ravina said: With regard to the stolen beam of a sukka, the Sages instituted an ordinance that the robber need not return it, due to the general ordinance of a beam. [Rabbi Steinsaltz explains: They instituted this ordinance to facilitate the repentance of the robber, who would be less likely to repent if doing so entailed destruction of the house.]
The Gemara notes: This halakha that the robber need not dismantle the sukka and return the beam applies only within the seven days of the Festival. However, after the seven days, the beam returns to the owner intact. And if the robber attached it with mortar and it is affixed permanently to the sukka, then even after the seven days of the Festival, the ordinance remains in effect, and the robber gives the orginal owner the monetary value of the beam.
QUESTIONS:
Modern Commentary, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Rosh HaShanah Sermon 5778
1. Teshuvah for a Stolen Beam
The premise of teshuvah—return, reconciliation—is that mistakes are inevitable in any relationship, family system or society. People need a way out, an exit strategy, so that the offender is not defined permanently by his villainy and the victim can free herself of perpetual victimhood.
In the Talmud (Gittin 55a), there is a dispute between Rabbis: what ought we do if a house, maybe even a beautiful palace, is built on the foundation of marish hagazul—a stolen beam?
How can Hillel, knowing that the beam at the heart of the palace is stolen, not insist that the whole house be taken down? Hillel is a pragmatist, and he’s almost always right. His argument is mishum takanat hashavin—for the sake of those who need healing, those who need to make things right. If you don’t create the possibility of teshuvah after something precious is stolen, you will ensure an unrepentant and unforgiving society in which cruelty is heaped on cruelty with no end in sight. Strict adherence to Biblical principle here would disincentivize anyone from ever admitting wrongdoing, ensuring that everyone loses.
But what happens when the mistake is not a momentary misstep, but rather an act of breathtaking immorality, perpetrated over the course of hundreds of years, [e]mbedded into the legal system, entrenched in everyday reality? How then are we to begin to repair?
2. A Palace Built on Stolen Beams
...I want to talk today about reparations, because this conversation stands at the center of so much that’s broken in America. And because I believe that Jews—because of our unique history—have a special obligation to help advance this conversation....
Today, there are 42 million African-Americans descendants of [American slavery]. Slavery was abolished more than 150 years ago, but the legacy of hundreds of years of cruelty and inhumanity remain largely unaddressed. ...The last century and a half has been a torturous journey from progress to regress, progress to regress.
After the Civil War, it was precisely the success of Reconstruction—under which fourteen black men were elected to the House of Representatives, and more than 600 elected to state legislatures across the south—that led to the violent backlash of the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups. ... Jim Crow was born, restricting, controlling and disenfranchising former slaves, and leaving black folks at the mercy of violent white mobs. Post-Reconstruction, there were more than 4,000 lynchings of African Americans across the south. ...Jim Crow enforced a system of racial discrimination and segregation in the south.
Many call the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s a Second Reconstruction, heralding not only legal advances toward the end of segregation, but also the triumph of the moral argument for equality. But like Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement was followed by yet another fierce backlash, what Bishop Barber calls “Mr. James Crow, Esq.” A cleaned-up version of Jim Crow that preserved the supremacy of whites over blacks in nearly all areas of civic and political life. This manifested as housing redlining, Nixon’s Southern Strategy and voter ID laws that have led to the systematic disenfranchisement of millions of black voters, including a North Carolina law from 2013 that an appeals court recently found “targeted African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
And now, after the election of the first black President of the United States, we are witnessing what many see as another massive backlash to the advancement of equality for People of Color in this country...
...As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his seminal piece on reparations: I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.
...Reparations would not suddenly ensure economic equality, nor would they erase generations of trauma. But they would offer some financial redress. And most significantly, they would signal a reckoning that our nation desperately needs.
3. The Stolen Beams of the Holocaust
Immediately after the end of WWII, the Jewish Agency demanded reparations and restitution for the Jewish people from Germany.
The idea of reparations was met with fierce opposition in the Jewish community, from across the political spectrum. Many saw it as blood money, a cheap way to buy forgiveness for the unforgiveable. And many felt it was both impossible and insulting to put a price tag on the atrocities ... But others argued that while no amount of money could give back what was taken from us, we could start to right some of the wrongs through monetary compensation.
David Ben-Gurion said: "There are two approaches. One is the ghetto Jew's approach and the other is of an independent people. I don't want to run after a German and spit in his face. I don't want to run after anybody. I want to build here." These funds helped build the infrastructure of Israel’s young economy, providing the foundation for Israel not only to achieve economic viability but ultimately positioning it to become the economic powerhouse it is today. That’s why Holocaust reparations are seen by many as a model for reparations to the black community in America.
Reparations allowed for Israel to purchase crude oil, steel, chemical, industrial, and agricultural products. Decades later, Germany also agreed to compensate individuals for slave and forced labor in a grossly insufficient lump sum payment, but one that signaled moral culpability and a desire to make amends.
...And there’s more. Within only a few generations, Germany has transformed itself from the worst world actor—responsible not only for the genocide of our people but for the death and destruction of millions more—to the world’s moral leader. It’s not a perfect place, as evidenced by the recent return of the far right to the political stage, but it has gone through an undeniable and dramatic transformation. How did that happen? Reparations gave Germany an opportunity to begin to come to terms with its history, to make amends and to rebuild itself into a thriving western democracy.
4. Practicalities of Reparations
[Most of ] the American Jewish community, arrived [in the U.S.] well after the abolition of slavery. We did not create this problem, but that does not free us from being part of the solution. We are beneficiaries of a national economic system that was built on stolen land and stolen labor, a foundational wrong that has never been rectified.
What would a national reckoning really look like? How would the US distribute reparations to 42 million people? What about black folks who are not descendants of slaves but are still victimized by a racist criminal justice system? What about poor white folks—won’t this only exacerbate racial tension? What about the slippery slope: won’t other minorities, like women and Latinos, suddenly make similar demands?
...I acknowledge the challenges, and I will not purport to know exactly what this should look like. But I believe that it reflects a profound lack of righteous imagination to argue that the practical difficulties should foreclose the commencement of this long overdue conversation. What we know is that injustice, unaddressed, does not disappear. It festers until it erupts.
Our nation has never contended honestly with its past. The point of teshuvah is to make it possible for people to move forward, to reconcile and begin to heal. We can’t undo the past. But we can name it, take responsibility for it, and do everything in our power to fix what’s been broken.
Rabbi Sharon Brous, 2017/ 5778 Rosh HaShana Sermon (click for full sermon)
QUESTIONS:
Topic sourced from Rabbi Avi Killip, 2020 An Ox, An Idol, & A Stolen Beam; Three Talmudic Paradigms for Understanding Racism in the United States. Listen to the full audio files from two-part learning sessions presented at the Hadar Executive Seminar 2020 here (session 1), and here (session 2). And access source sheet here.
Talmud Bavli Gittin 55a
And about a stolen beam that was built into a large building, [the victim] receives the value [of the beam but not the beam itself] due to an ordinance for the penitent…
The Sages taught: one who stole a beam and built it into a building, Beit Shammai say: destroy the entire building and return the beam to its owners. And Beit Hillel say: only the value of the beam, due to an ordinance instituted for the sake of the penitent.
QUESTIONS:
- What is required by the letter of the Torah law?
- What is required by the new requirement of the special ordinance?
- What does each incentivize?
- Which leads to greater overall justice?
- for the victim?
- the robber?
- for society?
Talmud Bavli Sukka 31a
Ravina said: With regard to the stolen beam of a sukka, the Sages instituted an ordinance that the robber need not return it, due to the general ordinance of a beam. [Rabbi Steinsaltz explains: They instituted this ordinance to facilitate the repentance of the robber, who would be less likely to repent if doing so entailed destruction of the house.]
The Gemara notes: This halakha that the robber need not dismantle the sukka and return the beam applies only within the seven days of the Festival. However, after the seven days, the beam returns to the owner intact. And if the robber attached it with mortar and it is affixed permanently to the sukka, then even after the seven days of the Festival, the ordinance remains in effect, and the robber gives the orginal owner the monetary value of the beam.
QUESTIONS:
- How might the themes of (im)permanence and humility during Sukkot, and our spiritual state directly after the High Holy Days, affect how we view the aims of the ordinance of the beam?
- How might the ordinance apply to our lives now? What might the stolen beam symbolize in our modern world?
- What are the limits, if any, of this legal theory's application?
Modern Commentary, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Rosh HaShanah Sermon 5778
1. Teshuvah for a Stolen Beam
The premise of teshuvah—return, reconciliation—is that mistakes are inevitable in any relationship, family system or society. People need a way out, an exit strategy, so that the offender is not defined permanently by his villainy and the victim can free herself of perpetual victimhood.
In the Talmud (Gittin 55a), there is a dispute between Rabbis: what ought we do if a house, maybe even a beautiful palace, is built on the foundation of marish hagazul—a stolen beam?
How can Hillel, knowing that the beam at the heart of the palace is stolen, not insist that the whole house be taken down? Hillel is a pragmatist, and he’s almost always right. His argument is mishum takanat hashavin—for the sake of those who need healing, those who need to make things right. If you don’t create the possibility of teshuvah after something precious is stolen, you will ensure an unrepentant and unforgiving society in which cruelty is heaped on cruelty with no end in sight. Strict adherence to Biblical principle here would disincentivize anyone from ever admitting wrongdoing, ensuring that everyone loses.
But what happens when the mistake is not a momentary misstep, but rather an act of breathtaking immorality, perpetrated over the course of hundreds of years, [e]mbedded into the legal system, entrenched in everyday reality? How then are we to begin to repair?
2. A Palace Built on Stolen Beams
...I want to talk today about reparations, because this conversation stands at the center of so much that’s broken in America. And because I believe that Jews—because of our unique history—have a special obligation to help advance this conversation....
Today, there are 42 million African-Americans descendants of [American slavery]. Slavery was abolished more than 150 years ago, but the legacy of hundreds of years of cruelty and inhumanity remain largely unaddressed. ...The last century and a half has been a torturous journey from progress to regress, progress to regress.
After the Civil War, it was precisely the success of Reconstruction—under which fourteen black men were elected to the House of Representatives, and more than 600 elected to state legislatures across the south—that led to the violent backlash of the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups. ... Jim Crow was born, restricting, controlling and disenfranchising former slaves, and leaving black folks at the mercy of violent white mobs. Post-Reconstruction, there were more than 4,000 lynchings of African Americans across the south. ...Jim Crow enforced a system of racial discrimination and segregation in the south.
Many call the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s a Second Reconstruction, heralding not only legal advances toward the end of segregation, but also the triumph of the moral argument for equality. But like Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement was followed by yet another fierce backlash, what Bishop Barber calls “Mr. James Crow, Esq.” A cleaned-up version of Jim Crow that preserved the supremacy of whites over blacks in nearly all areas of civic and political life. This manifested as housing redlining, Nixon’s Southern Strategy and voter ID laws that have led to the systematic disenfranchisement of millions of black voters, including a North Carolina law from 2013 that an appeals court recently found “targeted African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
And now, after the election of the first black President of the United States, we are witnessing what many see as another massive backlash to the advancement of equality for People of Color in this country...
...As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his seminal piece on reparations: I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.
...Reparations would not suddenly ensure economic equality, nor would they erase generations of trauma. But they would offer some financial redress. And most significantly, they would signal a reckoning that our nation desperately needs.
3. The Stolen Beams of the Holocaust
Immediately after the end of WWII, the Jewish Agency demanded reparations and restitution for the Jewish people from Germany.
The idea of reparations was met with fierce opposition in the Jewish community, from across the political spectrum. Many saw it as blood money, a cheap way to buy forgiveness for the unforgiveable. And many felt it was both impossible and insulting to put a price tag on the atrocities ... But others argued that while no amount of money could give back what was taken from us, we could start to right some of the wrongs through monetary compensation.
David Ben-Gurion said: "There are two approaches. One is the ghetto Jew's approach and the other is of an independent people. I don't want to run after a German and spit in his face. I don't want to run after anybody. I want to build here." These funds helped build the infrastructure of Israel’s young economy, providing the foundation for Israel not only to achieve economic viability but ultimately positioning it to become the economic powerhouse it is today. That’s why Holocaust reparations are seen by many as a model for reparations to the black community in America.
Reparations allowed for Israel to purchase crude oil, steel, chemical, industrial, and agricultural products. Decades later, Germany also agreed to compensate individuals for slave and forced labor in a grossly insufficient lump sum payment, but one that signaled moral culpability and a desire to make amends.
...And there’s more. Within only a few generations, Germany has transformed itself from the worst world actor—responsible not only for the genocide of our people but for the death and destruction of millions more—to the world’s moral leader. It’s not a perfect place, as evidenced by the recent return of the far right to the political stage, but it has gone through an undeniable and dramatic transformation. How did that happen? Reparations gave Germany an opportunity to begin to come to terms with its history, to make amends and to rebuild itself into a thriving western democracy.
4. Practicalities of Reparations
[Most of ] the American Jewish community, arrived [in the U.S.] well after the abolition of slavery. We did not create this problem, but that does not free us from being part of the solution. We are beneficiaries of a national economic system that was built on stolen land and stolen labor, a foundational wrong that has never been rectified.
What would a national reckoning really look like? How would the US distribute reparations to 42 million people? What about black folks who are not descendants of slaves but are still victimized by a racist criminal justice system? What about poor white folks—won’t this only exacerbate racial tension? What about the slippery slope: won’t other minorities, like women and Latinos, suddenly make similar demands?
...I acknowledge the challenges, and I will not purport to know exactly what this should look like. But I believe that it reflects a profound lack of righteous imagination to argue that the practical difficulties should foreclose the commencement of this long overdue conversation. What we know is that injustice, unaddressed, does not disappear. It festers until it erupts.
Our nation has never contended honestly with its past. The point of teshuvah is to make it possible for people to move forward, to reconcile and begin to heal. We can’t undo the past. But we can name it, take responsibility for it, and do everything in our power to fix what’s been broken.
Rabbi Sharon Brous, 2017/ 5778 Rosh HaShana Sermon (click for full sermon)
QUESTIONS:
- Do you find the connection between the ordinance of the stolen beam and American reparations to Black Americans compelling?
- If so, which part(s)?
- If not, what area(s) of thinking need to be addressed?
- How are German reparations after the Holocaust similar and different from American reparations to American Blacks?
- Given the similarities and/or differences, does the ordinance of the stolen beam apply better to one vs. the other?
- If you have see discrepancies in Rabbi Brous' logic, how would you solve them using your own best "righteous imagination"? (Extra points for applying Talmudic principles in your argument!)
Topic sourced from Rabbi Avi Killip, 2020 An Ox, An Idol, & A Stolen Beam; Three Talmudic Paradigms for Understanding Racism in the United States. Listen to the full audio files from two-part learning sessions presented at the Hadar Executive Seminar 2020 here (session 1), and here (session 2). And access source sheet here.