Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
Stephen Katz Bar Mitzvah
August 17, 2002
Parenting by Example
A story is told about a very poor Scottish mother who sent her son off to WWII. He joined the United States Navy and traveled to the four corners of the earth. After the war, the young man decided to stay in America. He wrote his mother a letter every month, and she read each of them with pleasure and glowed with pride at every word. He told her how he had become successful and wealthy in his adopted land.
Her neighbors in Scotland, listening to the pride with which she always spoke of her son, were curious. One day one of her friends finally got up enough nerve to ask: “If your son is so successful and so wealthy, how is it that he allows you to live in poverty – with so little food to eat and in such a broken down house?” Doesn’t your son ever send any money?”
The mother rather reluctantly replied, “No, but he does send me beautiful pictures every month in his letters.”
“May we see those pictures?” they asked curiously.
“Why certainly,” said the old lady. She pulled herself out of the rocking chair and went to the cupboard. She took down an old Bible from one of the shelves. From its pages, she pulled out the beautiful pictures her son had been sending her month after month. The neighbors looked at the them, and they turned red with embarrassment. For the pictures she was showing them turned out to be American $20 bills. There were enough greenbacks to satisfy all of this poor woman’s needs for the rest of her life. And all of this treasure was hidden away in the Bible.
All year round we speak of our pride in our Judaism. Sometimes we boast about it, and we bristle when it is defamed or attacked. But, friends, the vast treasure which is inherent in Judaism too often remains buried unopened, unused, unrecognized – its true value unappreciated.
All year we scurry about looking for the treasures of life. We often drive ourselves to the brink of exhaustion looking for satisfaction. We seek delight in all directions. We want meaning to give our lives purpose and values. We are forever searching for these treasures, when all the while they are hidden in the literature of Judaism.
Let me give you a very concrete example. Our Torah portion for this week teaches what appears to be a very simple commandment – brief, to the point. “If you see your fellow’s ox or sheep gone astray, do not ignore it. You must take it back to your fellow. If your fellow does not live near you or you do not know who he is – you shall bring it home. And it shall remain with you until your fellow claims it. Then you shall give it back to him. You shall do the same with his garment, and so, too, shall you do with anything your fellow loses and you find. You must not remain indifferent.”
I believe that law is crystal clear. If you find lost property, you must return it. In Jewish law, there is no such concept as “finders keepers, losers weepers.” Rather there is a legal obligation on the person who finds lost property to return it. This morning I would like to share with two stories which illustrate this commandment, this mitzvah.
David Platt, a free lance writer who lives in Oregon, wrote this story which first appeared in a magazine called “The Commonwealth”. He called it “The Cutting Edge of Memory.” This is what David Platt says:
“In a small bowl pinched from red clay, I keep my grandfather’s knife. I used to carry it everywhere in my pants pocket. It’s a two-bladed pen knife, made in Germany. At the base of each blade, two little men are joined at their shoulders and knees in the trademark.
The knife is old. My grandfather died at ninety-four and lived almost half his life in the nineteenth century. In those days, a knife had to be kept to fashion the tip of a quill pen. That’s how it got the name, ‘penknife.’
The blades and back spring are gray, not silver. They lie snuggled between shims of brass, next to the handles . . . The handles . . . are real mother-of-pearl, pale and radiant. Closed, the knife lies just short of a palm’s breadth, cool and glistening as a sardine.
The knife came to me when my mother was dying. In her last months, she sought to order her belongings. I’m not sure whether the knife was something I had seen before, but when it appeared in a handkerchief box holding small treasures from my grandfather’s desk and pockets . . . I knew it was something I wanted. I put it in my pocket the moment my mother gave me the chance.
I carried it there for over a year, every day. When my mother died, it was in my pocket. When I scattered her ashes . . . it was there. But when I returned across the Cascades to finish my term at the local college, and parked my car in the snow and cinders below the building where I would take my final exam in differential alculus, I lost the knife. I didn’t realize it until that night, but my pocket companion was gone.
Some people can lose objects and be unaffected. Lost things bother me. When something as close and beautiful as my grandfather’s knife is lost, I go a little crazy. I can’t get it out of my head. To me, lost means ‘not found’ rather than gone. I searched under cushions in the house, under the seat of the car, in the parking lot, the classroom, the men’s room, everywhere I’d been. I made calls, didn’t sleep well . . . stalked and paced. Days slipped into weeks, then months. I put thoughts of the knife aside and returned my attention to school. Still, I missed the knife in biology lab; it had been sharper than any scalpel.
I am not a reader of bulletin boards, except to kill time. The spring after my mother died I was back into the math building, waiting for a class in integral calculus to begin, when I drifted to a bulletin board . . . “Small pocket-knife found,” it said, and gave a phone number in Prineville, a town in the next county, an hour away.
When I got home, I called. Yes, it had pearl handles. No, I couldn’t remember the brand, but the trademark had two little men standing together. “What did the little silver shield on one side have on it.?” My heart stopped. “Nothing,” I said, “It’s blank.”
“Damn,” said the man in Prineville. “I was hoping nobody would claim it. It’s a beauty, and I’ve gotten used to it. I guess you’ll be wanting it, though.” I told him I’d be there in an hour.
He worked in the assessor’s office in the county courthouse, an old building of heavy stone and dark wood. I found him in a basement office, and he handed the knife across the counter, a little reluctantly. He had sharpened it differently, but it was my grandfather’s knife, returned.
When he found it in the snow and cinders below the math building, what thought pulled him to the bulletin board to pen his note? It was so small, furtive; he had not truly wanted to write it, yet was compelled. BY WHAT?
I don’t carry the knife with me anymore, and seldom use it. I’m afraid of losing it again. Or maybe the loss felt by the man at the courthouse when he remembers giving up the knife keeps it in the clay bowl instead of in my pocket. . . .
I find that simple story very moving, and I hope that you do too. It is not exactly a Jewish story; neither the loser nor the finder in this story was Jewish. But it is a very religious story.
The writer wonders. What moved the man who found his knife to put up a notice on the bulletin board? He wanted this knife, he liked it, and nobody would have ever known if he had just stuffed it in his pocket and gone on his way. It would not been theft, for surely the one who lost it had given up on ever getting it back. What moved him to take the trouble to go to the math building’s bulletin board and write that note?
Where is human character forged? Not in the big tests of life, for they do not come upon us very often. Human character is forged in the small deeds, like bending down and picking up a penknife that you find lying in the snow. Like walking into a building, finding a pen and a piece of paper and writing a notice of found property.
Story #2: My colleague, Rabbi Steven Reuben, watched this story unfold on TV in Los Angeles a couple of years ago. Tom and Pauline Nichter and their 11 year old son Jason were on the nightly news. They were at a police station and reporters were talking with them The Nichters had found a lost wallet on the street. It contained more than $2000 in cash, a credit card, a passport, and a plane ticket.
Now what made this story so memorable was not that they had turned it all over to the police, who did manage to find its rightful owner. No, what was remarkable about this story is that Tom and Pauline and Jason were homeless at that time. Both parents were out of work, and the three of them were living in their car. When asked why they turned in such a considerable treasure, Tom said, “Of course, it was tempting to keep the money. But I kept thinking – what if this is all the money this person has in the world? By keeping it, I end up putting him where I am today. And I just couldn’t have lived with myself after that.”
Pauline just laughed and said, “It is my mother’s fault. I looked at that lost wallet and kept hearing my mother’s voice in my head. ‘Pauline, do the right thing. Pauline, do the right thing’ and I couldn’t not do the right thing.”
(Somewhere along the line, the man who found David Platt’s grandfather’s knife must have had such a role model as well.)
And Rabbi Rueben says, “What I remember most about that story is the look on the face of Jason. Here he was living in his parents’ car, enduring one of the most emotionally destructive experiences that can happen to a child, and he was standing there in the police station beaming with pride.
What could be a more powerful parenting lesson in what it means to “do the right thing” than to experience all the attention, adulation, and respect that his parents received from the police, the media and the community for their act of honesty. Knowing that they did the right thing in spite of their current state of despair and homelessness made the lesson all the more powerful for any of us watching that night, and surely for Jason as well.”
Teaching ethics and values to our children is, without question, one of the most difficult and challenging tasks which every parent faces. Yet, this week’s Torah portion gives a simple, straightforward answer to that dilemma. “If you see your neighbor’s ox or sheep gone astray, do not ignore it. You must take it back to your neighbor. If he does not live near you or you do not know who he is, you shall bring it home and keep it with you until your neighbor claims it.”
Within this text is perhaps the most important parenting lesson the Jewish tradition can teach. It is simply this: Be the kind of adult you want your children to grow to be. Act as you would want your children to act in all things. Accept the reality that you are always the primary moral role model for your children, whether you want to be or not. James Baldwin captured this fundamental reality of parenting when he wrote, “Children have never been good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
When a friend leaves his/her sunglasses at your house, call and return them immediately, and your children will see and learn. When a child in your car pool leaves a book or sweater in the backseat of your car. Call his/her parent that evening and return the item to the family. Your children will see and learn.
Stephen, you and Matt and Ethan are very fortunate. You have grown up in a home where parents take their parenting responsibilities very seriously. They are role models who remember the last words of that Torah paragraph: “You must not remain indifferent. That is the real parenting challenge. To demonstrate by our actions and our lives that we are not indifferent to the lives of others. Friends, let’s not keep that lesson hidden away in some cupboard. That lesson will be learned only through living it. AMEN
I am grateful to Rabbi Herschel Leibowitz for the first story and to Rabbi Jack Riemer for the Platt article (both via TorahFax) and to Rabbi Steven Reuben (via The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles) for the last story and commentary.
