Losing It
Sermon Shabbat Ki Teitzei 5786
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
Does anyone here have a problem with losing stuff? I mean, does anyone else have a problem with misplacing things? I, personally, have the ability to walk into a room holding a critical item—my keys, my breakfast, sunglasses, a credit card bill, my sermon—and ten seconds later have absolutely no idea where I put it down. If I hadn’t forced myself to develop the habit of putting certain things in only one place in my house I’m quite sure I would never again be able to leave home. Thank God my cellphone now works as my car key, so I don’t have to worry about keys so much anymore. Of course, if I misplace my cellphone, the outside world essentially ends for me.
I have often searched the whole building for reading glasses that were perched atop my own head the whole time. I can lose anything and live in constant fear of that fact.
Now I’m pretty sure I come by this issue quite honestly; that is, I inherited it from my late mother, Claire Cohon. She was a remarkable woman in many positive ways, may her memory be a blessing, but one of the remarkable ways that was not so great was that every single morning she would panic and have her kids—there were four of us—scouring the house to try to find her missing car keys. My father, however, never seemed perturbed by this. One day—I must have been 13 or 14 by then—my dad took me aside while my mom was rushing about desperately trying to find her keys. He said to me, quietly, “Don’t you realize they are always in her purse?”
And so they were. There just were a lot of other things in that purse.
In any case, the tendency to lose things is a profoundly human problem. While I believe I am quite talented at it, most of us have the capacity to lose things. I suspect everyone here tonight, at one time or another, has panicked at the thought that they have lost their wallet, even though it usually turns out to be somewhere logical. And nothing quite reaches the terrible feeling of having the world pulled out from under you like losing your cellphone, carrier of your contacts, your electronic wallet, your theater and plane tickets, your financial information, your photos and videos, and, dare I say it, some of your very identity?
Losing things is a challenge. If you have ever witnessed a sensitive small child—especially your own child—lose a precious object, say a teddy bear or blanket or doll or new ball, well, you cannot forget the impassioned, tragic hysteria that follows. Losing items or objects is something we get more used to over time, as we mature. But I’m not sure we ever quite overcome that sense of loss when we recall a favorite sweater or pen or earring or photograph or any object we have come to care deeply about. In fact, the Buddhists might have it right on this subject: they preach that attachment to things is a human failure, and that removing the emotion we associate with object or items is an important goal in living a good life. Christian monks and nuns, when they take their vows of poverty, give up all that they have, too. There’s an advantage to this: you can’t lose things when you don’t have any. What is it Kris Kristofferson wrote? “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Not having stuff means you are free of tangible items to lose.
That doesn’t really work for us Jews, however. We Jews lack that concept of ending attachment to all items, and there aren’t any Jewish monasteries or convents—although we are buying a building from an order of nuns. But with our long history of communal loss, we are perhaps more sensitive to the concept of losing what we have than others might be.
Now the issue of losing items of value goes back a very long time. In this week’s Torah portion of Ki Teitzei, there are a series of laws that reflect on this possibility and seek to help the one who has lost an item. Most importantly, it includes the following rule:
“If you see your fellow’s ox or sheep gone astray, do not ignore it;
you must surely return it to your fellow… and so too shall you do with anything that your fellow loses and you find: you may not hide yourself.” (Devarim 22: 1-3)
That is, you must help find what has been lost. If we look beyond the physical items that we might lose—keys, eyeglasses, hats, purses, wallets, phones—we can come to comprehend just what a large place loss plays in our lives.
There is a legend in the Talmud of a large stone that was situated in the main courtyard of the Temple in Jerusalem. It was called even ha- to’in “the stone of losses.” The Tractate Baba Metziah tells us “Anyone who lost something would go there, and anyone who found something would go there. The person who found something would stand by the stone and announce what was found, and the person who lost something would go there and describe the lost object and so reclaim it.” [Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 28B]
This Stone of Losses was the one place in the world where you could go to find something valuable that was lost. For example, you could stand on one side and call out, “I lost my cloak,” or “My calf escaped, and I am looking for it.” And someone on the other side of the Stone of Losses would call out that he had such an object; then you would say, “The cloak was grey with a blue design” or “the calf had one white foreleg.” And once identified properly, you would get your property back and recover what you had lost.
Different Jewish texts apply slightly differing names to this stone: sometimes it’s even hato’in, with a tet, “the error stone,” probably because the loss was a mistake; or even hato’in (with a taf), literally “the wanderers’ stone” – since stray animals were often recovered there. While commonly translated as “the stone of losses,” it was also known as its opposite, “the finders’ stone,” for of course when you got your property back you were no longer a loser, but a finder.
So, what would you call out for if you could come to that Stone of Losses in the courtyard of the great Temple in Jerusalem?
Would it be something concrete? Money, or a home you loved, or a pet who passed away? Or would it perhaps be something in your personal life—say, that you lost your sense of smell? Or the opportunity to celebrate a milestone birthday with family and friends? Or that trip of a lifetime you’ve been planning for years? Or the chance to see your grandchild walk for the first time?—or would it be something quite different?
What is it that you have lost?
There was a wonderful cartoon called Bloom County that ran for many years, written and drawn by a man with the unlikely name of Berkeley Breathed. In one strip—it’s there on your Shabbat leaflet tonight—a leading character, Milo, comes up to the counter of a Lost-and-Found in a Sears department store. “Excuse me,” he says, “I’ve lost my youthful idealism.”
“I beg your pardon?” says the bowtied clerk.
“My youthful idealism,” Milo repeats, “I had it once but recently I’ve lost sight of it. Now I fear it’s been lost completely. I thought you might have it.”
“Oh, well, actually…” the man stutters.
“And what about my sense of optimism? Lately I’ve lost that too,” Milo continues.
“Well, I’m afraid I’ve got neither of those things--” the clerk starts to answer.
“Oh, boy,” says Milo, getting huffy, “Now I’ve lost my patience. I don’t suppose you’ve found THAT either.”
“Well, no…” mumbles the poor clerk.
“That’s just great!” Milo is shouting now, “Now I’ve lost my temper! So unless you’ve found that I’ll be off you inept oaf! Good day!!”
The flummoxed clerk calls out plaintively, “P-please! Hasn’t anybody lost something tangible?!”
And another leading character, Opus, answers from the front of the line “Excuse me. I’ve lost my marbles.”
Indeed.
What they needed in that comic strip of yesteryear was a kind of spiritual lost and found, a place to go to recover those elusive, ethereal, indefinable things that we have lost but we just aren’t going to find at the Sears’ Lost and Found. Especially now that we have lost Sears, too.
So where do we go to find this Stone of Losses now?
There is the story of the drunk who is searching for his keys under a lamppost. A guy comes by and says, “Did you drop them here?” And the drunk says, “No, but the light is better here.”
Maybe we haven’t yet found what we’ve been looking for because we’ve been looking in the wrong place for what we have lost.
When I was preparing for tonight I thought of a beautiful poem written by a teacher of mine, Tet Carmi, a great Israeli poet and translator and man of letters. It is called “The Stone of Losses” and comes from the book of the same name. I have had this book for many years, and I love it, and looked for it in the place where I always keep my favorite Jewish poetry collections. But of course, when I looked for it and then searched for it and frantically sought it, I discovered it was not there; I had lost the book—that is, I lost the book called the Stone of Losses. How appropriate…
Fortunately, after much searching, it reemerged in an unexpected location—the bookcase where I had put it away carefully, expecting to find it again someday. And it turns out that the poem retells the story of the Stone of Losses in a somewhat different way.
I search
for what I have not lost.
For you, of course.
I would stop
if I knew how.
I would stand
at the Stone of Losses
and proclaim,
shouting:
Forgive me.
I’ve troubled you for nothing.
All the identifying marks I gave you…
were never mine.
I swear by my life,
by this stone in the heart of Jerusalem,
I won’t do it again.
I take it all back.
Be kind to me;
I didn’t mean to mock you.
I know there are people here
--wretched, ill-fated—
who have lost their worlds
in moments of truth.
And I search
for what I have not lost…
“At the Stone of Losses”, by T. Carmi
The month of Elul we are embarked on, this final month of the Jewish year, marks the beginning of a quest, a search for t’shuvah, repentance. Most of all, we are each looking for something precious that we have lost. Only you know what it is that you lost and would like to reclaim—what it is that you need to reclaim, in order to return to the best that is within you, to make Teshuvah to the person you are meant to be.
Perhaps what you lost you can find right here. Perhaps you can find it by looking inside your own heart, and seeking to right the wrongs of the past year. Perhaps through those old things, repentance, prayer and charity you can find your way back to your best self again.