Chairman of the Hoard: The Mir Yeshiva’s Cash Cushion

Adapted from a shiur
by Rav Daniel Dombroff

The case of the overstuffed chair

Several bochurim
sat recently in a Mir Yeshiva dorm room. One was on an old upholstered chair
that another boy had rescued from the trash a couple of years earlier. The
chair felt uncomfortable, so he rose, flipped it over, and began to fiddle with
it, inadvertently breaking open the upholstery. Hundreds of bills in United
States currency cascaded to the floor.

One bochur
quickly gathered the fallen funds. The chair inspector managed to pick up a
lone hundred-dollar bill. The day’s take came to $30,000.

Word of the find
spread quickly through the Mir’s many batei medrash, and a spirited Torah debate soon
engulfed the yeshiva: To whom does the money belong?

A number of
candidates quickly emerged:

The salvager

The bochur who
retrieved the discarded chair years earlier clearly owns the chair. But when he
performed hagbaha
by lifting the ownerless furniture with intent to acquire it, did
he also acquire the hidden hoard that lay within?

The Pis’chei Teshuva
discusses the sale of a tin candlestick in which the tin was later discovered to
comprise only a thin veneer over a base of solid gold. Because a kinyan requires
da’as,
he writes, it does not incorporate anything that wasn’t known to be present.

But even if his hagbaha on
the chair didn’t acquire the cash for the chairman, another argument can be
made in his favor. With kinyan chatzer (see Bava Metzia 10b), one’s
property acquires anything inside it that is subject to acquisition, even
without his knowledge. For example, if a lost object of a sort that the finder
may keep lands in a man’s courtyard, it is his, even if he isn’t present and doesn’t
know it’s there. As one’s kailim have the same ability to acquire on his behalf
as his real property, would not the chair acquire the money on behalf of its
owner?

There is a shita that
something hidden in a way that it isn’t likely to be found is not subject to kinyan chatzer.
And even if it was
likely to be found (the owner argued that he had already begun to tinker with
the chair, because it had become uncomfortable, so he was bound to find the
money soon), it is questionable whether kinyan chatzer works on something not normally contained
there—say, money in a seat cushion.

Those present at the find

MideRabanan, the four amos of a person can acquire on his
behalf like a chatzer.
All agree that this rule applies in a simta (alley) and in tzidei reshus harabim (the sidewalk of a public domain).
A dorm room is effectively a chatzer shel shutfin (a courtyard owned in
partnership), which is generally treated like a simta with regard to kinyanim.

If no one else was within the dalet amos of the money, the one who freed it would acquire it by proximity. In this event, it seems, multiple people were within range, and it was unclear who had been there first. (The dalet amos belong, for kinyan purposes, to the first to arrive.) There is a view that an entire room is considered as one dalet amos. Perhaps we can apply this approach to kinyanim, in which case the first person to have entered the room would own the money.

The roommates

There is a Halachic
debate whether a renter has kinyan chatzer. The normative view is that he does, as
does a borrower. However, this is the case only when the rental or borrowing is
for a fixed term, in which case the user has a kinyan in the property. But when
the rental or borrowing is for a term of unspecified duration, and the owner
can terminate the arrangement at will, it is said in the name of the Brisker
Rav that no kinyan
has been made; the property is just being used with the owner’s permission.
While I don’t know the policy of the Mir Yeshiva, it is common for yeshivos to
reserve the right to change dormitory room assignments at any time, so the
Brisker Rav’s contention would pertain.

The yeshiva

Would the Mir then
retain the power of kinyan
chatzer, making it the rightful owner of the find? It
would seem that a yeshiva has the status of hekdesh, and that a yeshiva is owned only in the sense
that one “owns” a korban,
rather than belonging personally to its founder. And the Ketzos suggests
that hekdesh might
not have the power of kinyan chatzer at all.

(Note that the
Gemara says that kinyan
dalet amos doesn’t
apply in a reshus
hayachid, so if the room is considered to belong to the yeshiva,
this might negate the earlier argument in favor of the people present at the
find.)

Heir to the chair

Who would discard a
chair with $30,000 inside? Someone who didn’t know it was there. Most likely,
the person who stashed it there died or later suffered from dementia. Though we
normally follow Rabbi Yitzchak’s rule that one who loses money is aware of it
and despairs of retrieving it (yiush), making it ownerless, that wouldn’t apply under
these circumstances. However, the Rambam says that if an item is lost in a way
that it is unlikely to be found, it becomes ownerless.

*    
*     *

The case just came
before a Bais Din in Yerushalayim. The great principle of monetary Halacha is hamotzi
meichaveiro, alav haraya. If A lays claim to something in B’s
possession, A bears the burden of proof. As we have established, no party has a
solid Halachic claim to the money, so the court left it in the hands of its
holder.

Possession, as the
adage has it, is nine tenths of the law.