The Art of the Steal

Adam Mintz [00:02:48]: Amazing. That’s really an interesting way to go at it. And you’re right, every
yeshiva Bacher knows about gezel sheina and Genevas das. So here we’re gonna see the way they
talk about it. Good. I’m looking forward.
Geoffrey Stern [00:03:00]: So we’re going public. We’re going public. We’re giving our listeners an
insight into the Yeshiva mind, the insight into the Talmudic mind. So we are in Exodus 20:13, right
smack in the middle of the famous Ten Commandments, and it says, you shall not murder, you shall
not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You
shall not covet your neighbor’s house, you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female
servant, or ox or ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s. So there are a lot of, as the King James
Bible would say, “Thou Shalt Not’s” here. And right in the middle is, thou shalt not steal. That, I would
reckon to argue, most people would say is one of the most straightforward commandments. We get to
Rashi, and Rashi says, “Lo Tignov”, thou shalt not steal. Scripture here is speaking about a case of
one who steals human beings, whilst the command in Leviticus, you shall not steal, speaks about a
case of one who steals money from another person’s property. And he gets into the reason behind his
thought. He didn’t make this up. It comes from the Mechilta and the Talmud in Sanhedrin. And what
they do is you have to look at a verse in context. And since all of the other verses that I just
mentioned are culpable with the death sentence, therefore, according to this interpretation, it would
make no sense to include a civil offense of simply stealing. So each speaks of a matter which one
becomes liable to death by sentence of the court. So thou shalt not steal must be speaking about
kidnapping. Again, it’s an instance, Rabbi, where there is almost total unanimity, and it comes from
the oral law, but it impacts our understanding of something as basic as not stealing. I would say, given
the situation that we’re in today with our hostages, you might make a case that this gives us almost a
little insight into the sensitivity that we Jews have to stealing another soul. To kidnapping, I don’t
know. But here it is in the Ten Commandments, kidnapping is featured.
Adam Mintz [00:05:33]: Yeah, that’s for sure. I have a following question. So you know, of course,
you’re right, it has to be kidnapping, because stealing doesn’t rise to the level of the Ten
Commandments. But I have a question to ask you that’s rabbinic. Do you think that originally in the
Ten Commandments, when they just. All they had was the Torah, you think that it meant stealing as a
monetary crime, or you think even from its inception, it had to mean kidnapping?
Geoffrey Stern [00:06:02]: So I think that what drove the rabbis was something that is not altogether
logical. The rabbis believed that if you have a verse, it comes to teach us something. The rabbis
believe that there’s no repetition. You don’t just drop a line twice in the text. Each time has to mean
something different. And that was driving them. And I don’t think that would be the normal listener’s

point of view. I also think that there’s a relationship between stealing, kidnapping, and stealing things
that are monetary. We’re gonna see the whole gamut. But no, my gut reaction. Maybe as we
progress, we can kind of have this question in mind. But my gut reaction is that it wouldn’t be. It
wouldn’t be related. The only thing that I would say that might relate it is, let’s remember, not the
context of the punishment, but the context of the Exodus in terms of. I think that you could make a
case that many things could be brought into the narrative of slavery and redemption, of servitude and
freedom. But I think my gut reaction is that it says, don’t steal. I would take it as don’t steal.
Adam Mintz [00:07:22]: That’s it. Okay, I think that’s probably right. And I think that’s an interesting
point. Right. So the rabbis kind of, you know, evolved the explanation, but that’s not what it means in
the simple text.
Geoffrey Stern [00:07:36]: And so I think, as I said in the intro, this is more a discussion and a
commentary on the rabbinic mind than it necessarily is on the intention of the biblical text. But in terms
of the rabbinic mind, it is something in line with what we discussed last week that kind of becomes
ingrained in us, the Jewish people, the readers of these texts and how they were perceived. And my
guess is that although for us, we need a Rashi to remind us that it’s kidnapping, maybe through the
generations impacted by what the Rabbi’s interpretation was, that’s how they took it. We’ll see. We’ll
see as we progress. Rashi References Leviticus 19:11, where there is another reference to stealing. It
says, you shall not steal. You shall not deal deceitfully or falsely with one another. You shall not swear
falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God. You shall not defraud your fellow You shall not
commit robbery. The wages of a laborer shall not remain with you until morning. So on the one hand,
what this verse was saying to Rashi is this, in the Ten Commandments, does not have to talk about
robbery or stealing as we know it. There’s another verse who deals with that. But on another
perspective, Rabbi, what Leviticus starts to show to us is how broad the Jewish, the Israelite, the
rabbinic mind took stealing. All of a sudden we’re talking about wages of a laborer shall not remain to
you until morning. I’d like to say I’m sitting here looking outside in Connecticut at a lot of snow on the
ground, and there’s this beautiful saying that says the eskimos have what, 50 words for snow. I think
what we might come up with today is that the Jewish mind, the rabbinic mind, had had 50 ways for
stealing. In other words, they were very sensitive to deceit. They were very sensitive to taking
somebody property away from them, taking somebody’s identity away from them. That’s what my read
is. And getting back to your original question, what I’d like to argue is there’s a whole spectrum of
meaning that the rabbis saw and maybe the reader saw in the word stealing. And that might be true to
the text.
Adam Mintz [00:10:13]: Yeah, I think that’s good. And you know, you see that from the verse, that
there are so many different areas that are all under the category of stealing.
Geoffrey Stern [00:10:22]: Yeah. So let’s get back to what the rabbis say the Ten Commandments is
talking about. In Sanhedrin, the Gemara asks from where is a prohibition against abducting a person
derived? Rabbi Yoshia. That is derived from the verse you shall not steal. That’s our verse. Rabbi
Yochanan says that it is derived from the verse they shall not be sold as slaves. In Leviticus, the
Gemara comments, and they do not disagree. These two rabbis, as each requires both verses to
derive the prohibition. One says, Rabbi Yoshia, enumerates the prohibition against abduction. And
one sage, Rabbi Yohanan, enumerates the prohibition against selling the abductee into slavery. This
is what I was talking about before. The rabbis saw a connection between the do not steal in the Ten
Commandments and this being a slave and being sold as a slave, and do not sell someone as a slave
because you were a slave in Egypt. And so maybe, yes, that did color the way they saw that do not
steal in the Ten Commandments. And maybe for 600,000 slaves listening to this, when they heard
about stealing, they didn’t know so much about mercantile stealing and possessions. They did know a
little bit about stealing people.
Adam Mintz [00:11:54]: Yeah, for sure. I mean, that’s right. You say, you say, what’s the history of
kidnapping? And I think we know from the Bible itself that kidnapping is something that goes back to
the ancient world, a.
Geoffrey Stern [00:12:06]: Very, very ancient world. We will see that it was part and parcel of culture.
But again, it does Take us back to that original sin that we discussed in a previous episode of Joseph
being captured and then Joseph being sold into slavery.

Adam Mintz [00:12:27]: That’s not. By the way, that’s not exactly the same thing as kidnapping.
Geoffrey Stern [00:12:32]: Okay, right.
Adam Mintz [00:12:33]: I mean, that. I was going to say the war of the Four Kings against the Five
Kings. They took Lot as a hostage. Right. I mean, it’s interesting to see, you know, how those cases
relate to our cases. But clearly in the Bible, there are cases of kidnapping.
Geoffrey Stern [00:12:49]: Yes, yes. And I think that hostage taking, kidnapping, bounty hunting, when
you’re waging a war, taking possession of people under who you conquer, they’re all kind of
connected, but they’re all, unfortunately, differently. We have a very nuanced language of taking
somebody else. So the Ibn Ezra becomes kind of fascinating. Exactly. For what you just brought up.
He says on our verse, stealing implies taking money secretly. There are thieves who incur the death
penalty, namely those who kidnap an Israelite, be he a child or one who cannot speak clearly. And I
scratched my head, Rabbi, when I read this, and I said, what is he talking about? Ben shHu na’ar
katan o’nela’ag Lashon And it made me realize that there’s another part of kidnapping that was
probably very well known, but we don’t talk about or think about much. My father, his mother took
many years to have a baby. And when she finally had the baby, she read in the newspaper that two
children were misplaced in the hospital, that the mother took home the wrong child, so she had him at
home. There are stories about the Yemenites who came to Israel, that maybe the Labour government
took their babies in a way to acculturate them and gave them to Ashkenazi or other families. There
was a documentary on TV about an adoption agency that somehow was placing children in different
homes. That’s a whole other part of kidnapping that we don’t talk about. But it’s pretty clear that when
the Ibn Ezra says, be he a child or one who cannot speak clearly, means the child doesn’t know who
his parents are, or if he knows who his parents are. He can’t articulate who his parents are. He’s
brought up in another environment. So, again, that was kind of fascinating to me.
Adam Mintz [00:14:56]: Did you check the. Did you check the etymology of the word kidnapping?
Geoffrey Stern [00:15:02]: I looked it up. There was no Wikipedia page. I saw, like a Merriam Webster
type of thing. Right. And it was related to the kid? Oh, it was related.
Adam Mintz [00:15:10]: I never, you know, in all the years, I never thought about that. But of course,
it’s right. That’s who you kidnap as you kidnap children. That’s interesting.
Geoffrey Stern [00:15:19]: Either because you’re barren or whatever the reason was, it must be that
that’s.
Adam Mintz [00:15:24]: Who they kidnapped in the world when that word was created.
Geoffrey Stern [00:15:28]: It was a thing. It was a thing.
Adam Mintz [00:15:30]: It was a thing.
Geoffrey Stern [00:15:31]: So we get to the Mishnah Torah by Maimonides, who codified the law. And
he says, the Torah prohibits stealing even the slightest amount. It is forbidden to steal as a jest, as a
joke, to steal with the intent to return. In the Hebrew it says al manat le hazir. Some of the
commentaries we’re going to see in a second have a fascinating textual emendation to this. Because
why would one ever want to steal in order to return? He goes on to say, or to steal with the intent to
pay all is forbidden, forbidden, lest one habituate oneself to such conduct. So again, from the mindset
of Maimonides, there’s more to stealing than taking the object from another person. There’s a mindset
that should not become habitualized. And then of course, he goes into the difference between and
this. The Iben Ezra focused on for a second, the difference between a thief and a robber. A thief takes
unbeknownst to the owner, not in front of the owner, and a robber confronts the owner as well. But
there’s no main difference for what we’re concerned. Here’s where it gets interesting, Rabbi. In Baba
Mitzia, the Talmudic source for Maimonides, the Gemara says, why do I need the prohibition you shall
not steal, that the Merciful One? This is not another prohibition against taking money by illegitimate
means. And it could be derived from other provisions mentioned previously. The Gemara answers
that it is necessary for the Merciful One to write that prohibition. For that which is taught in a you shall
not steal applies in all circumstances, even if you did so in order to aggravate the victim. You shall not

steal applies in all circumstances, even if you did so in order to pay the double payment as a gift to
the person with whom you stole. And this is why they changed Maimonides, in other words, Rabbi,
they thought of a scheme for someone who wanted to help his fellow friend. And so what he does is
he steals $100 knowing that the law is depending on the circumstances, you have to pay back.
Adam Mintz [00:18:02]: Either double or four or five times.
Geoffrey Stern [00:18:05]: Four or five times. What are people we belong to that people would come
up with a money laundering scheme such as this in order to benefit the recipient. You know, at my
grandfather’s funeral. Somebody told me they heard a story that he was in a resort area called
Bournemouth in England and they used to go there for the high holidays. And somebody comes over
to my grandfather and says, I had a tough year, could you help help me out with High Holidays
tickets? And my grandfather very gruffly said, no, which wasn’t characteristic of him. And the man
walked away. And the person who told me this story said, then he went, my grandfather went to the
sexton and say, buy him tickets and put it on my account. And he said to him, why did you do it that
way? So my grandfather said, I don’t want him looking at me the whole high holidays as if I paid for
his tickets. I mean, and it was so, I think, representative of my grandfather, who kind of like really
enjoyed doing a mitzvah, maybe with a little bit of an angle. But it also tapped into the Jewish
neshama, the Jewish soul. And here we have a scheme. We’ve uncovered a scheme for being able to
give to a person money and making it seem like it’s obligation, not like you’re supporting him.
Adam Mintz [00:19:24]: Fantastic.
Geoffrey Stern [00:19:26]: So again, I think the real interesting takeaway, besides how people might
see steal in order to help somebody is twofold. On the one hand, Maimonides says, don’t get into the
habit of stealing, no matter what the reason. It’s a bad mindset. And the other thing is, and we’re
going to come across this, I believe, going forward is this whole sense of the ends justify the means,
that sometimes you can cut a few corners, but as long as you’re doing it for the right intentions, as
they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You can’t do it. And that’s a fascinating study
in what Geneva or stealing meant in the rabbinic mind.
Adam Mintz [00:20:10]: Yeah, well, the end justify the means in a legal sense is fascinating. Okay,
let’s see what the Ramban says.
Geoffrey Stern [00:20:17]: So the Ramban, as always, is, you know, he’s going to quote Rashi and he
is going to also quote the Ibn Ezra. And what he says is. Is fascinating. He says that actually, and he
literally puts it into the context of all of the Ten Commandments. And he says what God is saying now,
I have commanded you to acknowledge in thought and indeed that I am the creator of all and to honor
parents because they join me in your formation. So now he’s basically going from Commandment 1 to
5, Rabbi. And saying the first thing is if you honor God, you have to honor the parents who are a
Partner in creating each of us. Then it says, if so, guard against destroying the work of my hands and
spilling the blood of man. Don’t kill who I have created in order to honor me and acknowledge me in
all of these manners. And do not commit adultery with your fellow man’s wife, because you will
thereby destroy the principle of honoring parents, causing the children to deny the truth and
acknowledge falsehood, they will not know their fathers and thus give their honor to another, just as
idol worshipers do who say of a block of wood, thou art my father. So he’s tied in stealing, he’s tied in
adultery. All to the first five commandments of honoring one’s father in heaven and one’s parents. He
warned against stealing a human being. So Ramban follows the traditional interpretation, for that too
brings about a similar disintegration of values with respect to their stringency and penalties. The order
of the commandments is as after idolatry comes bloodshed, and after that, adultery and then stealing
of a human being and false testimony and robbery. So now the commentary found something
interesting. Ramban believes that coveting also relates to the action of robbery. Ramban mentioned
here robbery, Although the Ten Commandments speak of coveting. Why? Because he who does not
covet will never harm his neighbor. Thus, he completed all obligations that a person owes towards his
neighbor. So Ramban is able to get into the Ten Commandments, both kidnapping and stealing.
Adam Mintz [00:22:49]: Well, let’s talk for a minute about what that means. You shall not covet. And it
says robbery. He is worried about a legal problem, Geoffrey, and that is I covet. You know, you drive
down the street and you’re driving in your convertible, in your convertible sports car, and I covet that
sports car. There’s no way that there’s a prohibition in that. There’s no way. The prohibition is that if I

covet your sports car, convertible, and that leads me to steal it, then I’m in violation of two things.
Thou shalt not covet and thou shalt not steal.
Geoffrey Stern [00:23:33]: So what you’re saying is, and it’s so strongly ingrained in biblical and
rabbinic thinking that thoughts cannot be forbidden, just even as belief in the Ten Commandments.
There’s a big argument whether believing in God is one of our commandments. We believe in
orthopraxis. Rabbi Riskin used to say, not orthodoxa. We believe in correct practice and not correct
belief. But here, certainly, what Ramban seems to be implying is that if you’re not allowed to covet, it
must mean you’re not allowed to do an action that comes out of coveting. Now, Cassuto disagrees
with Ramban, but in his disagreement, he brings some verses that say, and if you believe like
Ramban, you would bring these verses. So he brings a verse from Exodus, and it talks about when
you go on the pilgrimage holiday. It says, I will drive out nations from your path and enlarge your
territory, so no one will covet your land when you go to appear before your God three times a year. So
there it uses the same word lo t’yahmod ish et al Tzo, where clearly it means, why would you go up to
Jerusalem three times a year and leave your property by itself? It’s like everybody in Israel has
Broadway tickets. They’re all going to be robbed. So here you can argue there is that connection
between actually the word between it. And. So similarly, there’s a word in Micha. But what I love is
that Ramban is trying to create a narrative out of the Ten Commandments, and he’s trying to fit both
kidnapping and the more pedestrian stealing into that narrative. I’m not sure it’s there, but I give him
an A for effort. And again, he’s trying to put it into context. But what he’s putting into context is this
idea of the social network. And that’s what Ramban is really saying, that if you do any one of the thou
shalt nots in the second tablet, you are breaking the social network that is formed by saying God.
Everyone is created in God’s image, and your parents are partners in that. And then anything you do
to disrupt that is breaking the social image, the social network. And in a sense, stealing comes up
twice in that. And that’s kind of fascinating. Good.
Adam Mintz [00:26:09]: I would agree with that. I mean, that just shows you how serious stealing is,
you know? But it moves from kidnapping back to stealing. Right. The minute that you talk about
coveting and stealing, that’s not kidnapping, that’s stealing.
Geoffrey Stern [00:26:24]: Yeah, Again. And it elicits this whole conversation. But we are involved
with stealing. So there is a midrash in Pirkei du Rav Eliezer, that Rabbi I know you like a lot, because
you’ve mentioned it a few times. And what it says, according to Rabbi Tofen, the Holy One, blessed
be he, rose and came from Mount Sinai and was revealed unto the sons of Esau. So there are a
bunch of midrashim that says, why did the Jews get the Torah? Did God go ahead and offer the
Torah to the other nations of the world? So in this rendering of that midrash, it says that he revealed it
unto the sons of Esau, as it is said, and it quotes Deuteronomy and the Holy One. Blessedly, he said
to them, will you accept for yourselves the Torah? They said to him, what’s written in the Torah? And
he answered, it’s written, you shall not murder. They replied to him, we are unable to abandon the
blessing which Isaac gave Esau and said, by the sword shall you live. Fine. Then he goes on to the
sons of Ishmael, and he says, will you accept the Torah? And they said, what’s written therein? He
answered, thou shalt not steal our verse. And he said, they said to him, we are not able to abandon
the usage which our fathers observed, for they brought Joseph down into Egypt, as it is said, for
indeed I was stolen away of the land of the Hebrews. So what’s interesting about this midrash, Rabbi,
is that, number one, even in this midrash, they consider thou shalt not steal kidnapping, because they
reference the story of Joseph. The other thing that’s interesting is, again, they bring it back into the
narrative of Yitziyat Mitzrayim of leaving Egypt. The third thing that we have to make clean is one
issue. When you read so many of the texts of stealing that we talk about, it says, re ehu from your
brother. And what that is typically translated is many of these laws have a double standard, Jew to
Jew and Jew to non Jew. And in this midrash, the B’nai Yishmael are saying, we can’t accept this law,
this prohibition against kidnapping other people from other tribes, from other countries. It’s clear in the
understanding of this midrash here that when the Ten Commandments say thou shalt not steal, it
means anybody. And specifically, it means someone who’s not your tribal brother. And I think that’s
fascinating.
Adam Mintz [00:29:08]: That’s also interesting, right? That’s an amazing expansion of the law.
Geoffrey Stern [00:29:13]: It is. It is. And I think it’s a wonderful lens to read this midrash through,
because normally we just read it in terms of the Torah was offered to other people in the world. But
what it gives us is a better insight into what’s in the Torah and what it is that we actually accepted. So

we are running out of time. As I said in the introduction, there is a Sefaria notes in the show notes for
this podcast. But there are other usage of the word to steal that the rabbis say, and one of them has
to do again with our Parsha. And it has to do. And it says, that God himself may have been, I would
say, guilty of being involved in stealing. There’s a part that says, which is worse to steal or to have
someone steal from you and not say anything? And it’s talking about something that I mentioned
before Genevat dat when you are deceitful to somebody. So which is worse? The Talmud asked to be
deceitful or to have someone be deceitful and not say anything. And the answer that the rabbinic
source gives is it’s worse to not say anything. And the example that they give, using that wonderful
word that you raised last week of Kivi Yachol Rabbi, is that when God heard the Jewish people say
naasev v’nishma, we will listen, and then we will observe. He knew they were deceiving him and he
said nothing. It’s amazing.
Adam Mintz [00:30:58]: It happens to be that that source in your sources is the Toseftah. And it’s an
amazing Tosefta. Whose crime is greater, the thief or that he who has stolen from you could say the
one who has stolen from him was silent, as we find when Israel was standing at Mount Sinai, they
asked to deceive God. As it is written, everything that God says we will do and we will obey, as if to
say was stolen to them as we learned. May they always be of such mind to revere me and follow my
commandments. And if you argue that not everything is revealed before him, we have already said,
you have deceived him with their speech.
Geoffrey Stern [00:31:37]: So it is truly amazing that when somebody, you’re talking to somebody and
you know they need help and they say something and you accept it, even though that you know
they’re trying to deceive you, you are as bad as the deceptor himself. We have in other episodes
talked about the wonderful mitzvah of source citing. When Esther cited her source, it says, haOmer
Davar B;Shem Omro But the other side of that rabbi, is the rabbinic text saying that you have to cite
your source and that if you steal somebody else’s material, you are culpable of stealing. We’ve talked
about shopping laws, we’ve talked about opening up stores next to another store where you’re
stealing a livelihood. It really truly is amazing how far the rabbinic mind, and I would say our combined
mind of the Jewish people has taken this concept of deceiving and being deceptive talking. There are
rules about can you use an etrog that was stolen? Mitzvah haba M’averah. If you think at the rules
that go through the spectrum of kidnapping all the way to trivial mercantile stealing something. It is
truly profound what the Rabbis and I think that at the end of the day, is what the gift of our reading of
the Commandments today in terms of thou shalt not steal is. And it’s our own little revelation at the
foot of Sinai that will give us pause and make us think a little bit more about how we speak and how
we act and how we interact with each other.
Adam Mintz [00:33:29]: Fantastic. What a great topic. Enjoy the parsha, everybody, and we look
forward to seeing you next week.