Ki Teitse 5786

There is a small grammatical oddity in this week’s parsha that raises a much bigger question. The Torah commands us to return a lost animal or object, but concludes with the unusual words lo tuchal l’hitalem — “you are not able to hide yourself.” Why describe turning away as an impossibility rather than a prohibition?

Rav Hirsch explains that the Torah is not simply saying “do not hide.” It means that you cannot exempt yourself. The Sages recognize genuine exceptions, but what the Torah does not allow is inventing our own excuse: “this is not my responsibility.” Ramban and Rambam take the idea further: ignoring another person’s loss is not merely failing to do good; it is itself a moral failure.

Modern psychology calls this the “omission bias” — our tendency to feel less responsible when we allow something to happen rather than actively causing it. The Torah rejects that escape. It tells us that when we see someone’s loss, we cannot simply walk away and say it is not our concern. Lo tuchal l’hitalem teaches us to become people for whom seeing and caring are inseparable — people who have learned to stop looking away.

The ideas are shaped and based on the work of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, and influenced by Maimonides, Nachmanides, Don Isaac Abarbanel, Samson Raphael Hirsch, David Zvi Hoffmann, Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel, and Uri Amos Cherki.