The Midrash on this week’s parshah describes how, when faced with disaster after Yosef’s silver goblet was found among Binyamin’s possessions, Yehudah appealed to the apparently Egyptian leader, asking why he would want to take his youngest brother as a slave. He reasoned that according to the Torah, taking Binyamin made no sense, as he had the money to pay for the goblet, and the Torah only allows selling someone who lacks the means to repay what was stolen. But why did Yehudah think that a gentile king would care to take guidance based on the Torah?
The Ohel Yaakov explains that the Torah teaches that if a thief is caught and “ain lo” — he has nothing with which to repay his debt — then he should be enslaved in order to repay it. However, if he does have the wherewithal to repay, he isn’t sold. The logic is that if he stole even though he has money, this indicates that he did so due to his evil character traits, and not out of necessity. Such a thief is not the kind of person one wants in one’s home, even as a slave. In all probability, such a person will steal again and the slave owner will wake up one morning to find the slave gone, together with all his valuables. Someone who “ain lo,” by contrast, is not a thief by nature and once his needs are provided for, it can be assumed that he will not steal again.
Therefore, what Yehudah was telling Yosef was that if he really believed Binyamin to be a thief, then given that he was in no need of the goblet, he must be a thief by nature. In such a case, he must not be the kind of person anyone sensible would want to have as a household slave, and it would be better to take someone else in his place.
From the perspective of a person whose possessions have been stolen, it might not make much difference whether the thief stole out of necessity or for pleasure. But the Torah teaches us that it should. Some people simply give in to their yetzer hara and allow themselves to enjoy the experience; others do constant battle with the yetzer hara and still lose the fight on occasion. What’s sadder than that, however, is that some people wage war and find that not only are they opposed by their yetzer hara, but also that other people in their lives are actually making it harder for them to do the right thing. It’s not an excuse, yet it can be helpful when people are more understanding of each other.
We all have deficiencies, and we all deal with the deficiencies of others. We must try to do what we can to minimize the hardship our deficiencies cause others, and at the same time ensure that we don’t make it harder for them to overcome their own struggles.
