Cash and Carry

By Rabbi Joshua (Transportingly known as The Hoffer) Hoffman.

In memory of Steve Ehrlich, a student of Rav Aharon Soloveichik, zt”l, who passed away recently in Chicago. May his memory be a blessing.

Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan, in his biography of his father, the Netziv, entitled Rabban Shel Yisroel, relates the story of a group of students in the yeshiva of Volozhin who were working on a collection of articles with Talmudic insights written by their fellow students. They planned to publish them in a volume entitled “HaBoker Ohr,” meaning the day dawned, taken from a verse in parshas Mikeitz (Bereishis 44:3), which speaks of Yosef sending the brothers home to Cana’an with the grain they purchased, as well as the money they used to purchase it with, which Yosef arranged to be placed in their sacks, and the silver goblet he drank from, which he arranged to be placed in Binyomin’s bag. The Netziv, hearing about the students’ project, spoke to them, and told them not to proceed with it, because at that stage in their lives they needed to concentrate on their standard learning. The students tried to convince him to allow them to continue their project, whereupon the Netziv told them that if they persisted, he would fulfill the next words in the verse, “And the men were sent out.”

Many years ago, when I was a student at the Yeshiva in Skokie, I told this story to my good friend, the late Rabbi Moshe Chaim Dombey, z”l, and he responded by citing the rest of the verse, “they and their donkeys.” I assumed, at the time, he did this, not to add at all to the story, but simply because, as the expert Torah reader that he was, he knew the verse by heart and instinctively filled in the last words of the verse. Actually, Rabbi Eliezer Yitzchak of Volozhin, a grandson of Rav Chaim of Volozhin, asked what need there was to add these words to the verse altogether, since it is understood by itself that the donkeys left along with the brothers. He answered by citing the Talmud in Ta’anis (24a), which says that the donkey of Rabbi Yosi ben Yokeres, when it was hired out to others, would not return if the money sent back on it in payment was not the exact amount, and even if an extra pair of sandals was placed on it. Similarly, Yosef took it as a sign from heaven that his ruse of placing the brothers’ money and his own silver cup back on the donkeys was the proper thing to do, because, otherwise the donkeys would not have left with the brothers.

Perhaps we could add to this explanation by citing the comment of Rav Moshe Feinstein, zt”l, to a verse later in the parsha. When Yosef told the brothers that Binyomin, in whose sack the goblet was found, would become his slave, they responded by saying that he should take all of them as slaves. Rashi explains, that if a stolen object is found with one person among a group of ten people, all of them are culpable. Rav Moshe, zt”l, says that this is simply not the halacha. However, he says, even though, in a human court the other nine are not punished, still, they are all, in a sense, responsible, because their revulsion of sin should be so great that no one in their circle would even consider committing it. Therefore, if even one person among them sinned, it reflected on all of them, and they all were, in a sense, guilty.

While Rav Moshe, zt”l, was speaking about all forms of sin, he may have had particular intention in relating them to the situation of the brothers. I once heard Rav Moshe’s son, Rav Reuven, relate that the faculty of his father’s yeshiva once suggested that the tractate studied by students when they began studying Talmud should be changed from Bava Metzia to Brochos. He responded that the yeshiva would continue to follow the old tradition of beginning Talmud study with the second chapter of Bava Metzia, which deals with laws concerning lost objects. Privately, he told Rav Reuven some other reasons for his decision. One of them was that when students begin to study Talmud, they do not cover a lot of ground. Rather, they continually review the same few pages, in order to learn the Arameic words and the style of the Talmud. In this way, said Rav Moshe, they will have ingrained into their consciousness, at an early age, that they should not touch something that does not belong to them. This was the kind of sensitivity to theft that Rav Moshe, zt”l, wrote about in explaining why the brothers felt that they were all responsible for the goblet of Yosef being found in Binyomin’s sack.