In a Jewish Courtroom

One of the most interesting civil laws in Torah appears in this week’s Torah Portion.

Abraham and Isaac come to Court. Isaac is asking to be repaid the $1,000 he claims Abraham borrowed from him. Abraham denies ever having borrowed anything. There are no receipts or witnesses.

The judges will send Isaac packing. No proof, no claim. Abraham won’t have to pay and won’t even have to swear that he owes nothing.

However, if Abraham admits to the loan but insists that he already repaid $500, the judges will impose a very serious oath on him, forcing him to swear on the Torah that he isn’t lying.

So total denial goes free, but partial denial gets slammed.

And there’s a simple logic here. The judges cannot obligate someone to pay or take a Torah oath with zero evidence or suggestion of guilt. Someone's claim is not enough weight to suggest anything. But when there is some evidence but not enough to impose repayment, they can force out the truth by intimidating either the claimant or the defendant by telling them to swear they’re being truthful.

In the case of an (interest-free) loan, the two sides are lopsided: The lender is sacrificing and receiving nothing in return. The borrower is gaining and at no cost whatsoever. The dynamic is one where one party is utterly indebted (financially and) emotionally to the other.

The evil inclination to steal is usually accompanied by the self-justifying feeling that the person whose money you’re stealing is not entirely a victim because they gained here too and hey, “that’s the cost of doing business.”

But in this case where the indebtedness is so complete and one-sided that it would take a truly heartless man to cheat and utter a bold-faced false denial of the loan to his selfless benefactor, the judges assume that if he denies the loan (and there isn’t any other evidence) he must be telling the truth – that the so-called lender never lent anything.

But when he admits part and denies part, the judges smell a rat. Since he’s fudging his story, admitting to some and only denying some, the judges suspect a guilty conscience and an attempt to squelch it with a partial confession. They suspect that he’d like to deny the whole loan, but his shame at wronging his benefactor is restraining him from doing that so out of his inability to flatly deny the whole story, he has decided to pay back half. Now they will make him swear that he’s not lying.

So the whole law is founded upon one ethical, moral assumption: The average person doesn't have the audacity to look his benefactor in the face and deny ever having been helped by him. 

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Our lives and souls are given to us on loan from G-d. He is our Benefactor.

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Shabbat Shalom!