This week’s Torah portion, Lech Lecha, carries Abraham into the unknown and offers a quiet lesson about how we see the world and how that seeing shapes it. To get there, I want to start with a riddle, move through a law about lost objects, and end with the physics laboratory.
Almost everyone has heard the question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Philosophers have debated it for centuries. Curiously, Jewish law offers its own answer. In certain legal contexts, if no one has become aware of an event, then, for practical purposes, it has not yet happened. Awareness is not a bystander to reality. In some cases, it is part of what makes the event real.
The Torah obligates us to return lost property to its owner, but there is an exception. If the owner has despaired of ever recovering the item and has mentally severed ownership, the finder may keep it. The Hebrew word for this despair is yeush. Consider a dollar bill, identical to every other, lost in a crowded place. Its owner will almost certainly give up hope at once, and whoever finds it may keep it.
Here the law becomes subtle. Maimonides rules that if a person drops a dollar or a quarter and does not know it fell from his pocket, he has not despaired of it. This is true even if the object has no identifying mark. He will surely despair the moment he discovers the loss, but until then he has not. The finder may not take the item until the owner becomes aware of the loss and gives up hope.
Think about what this means. The money is objectively gone. It lies on the pavement, in no one's hands. Yet in the eyes of the law, it is still fully owned because the owner has not yet turned his attention to the loss and declared it lost. Something is not despaired of, and therefore not lost, until the person gives it his attention and his surrender. In Jewish law, loss is not merely a physical fact. It is a state of mind.
The Hebrew word yeush, meaning despair, has a numerical value of 317. Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, appears in this week’s portion as Abraham rescues his nephew Lot, who had been taken captive. The Torah says Abraham pursued the captors with 318 men, and our Sages teach that this “army" was actually Eliezer alone, a single servant whose name equals 318. Eliezer is derived from Eli ezer, “my God is help."
The difference between despair and divine help is exactly one. Eliezer begins with the letter aleph, which has a value of 1. That single extra unit transforms the entire word. One small sliver of added faith lifts a person above despondency and despair. A man standing at 317 has given up. Add one - the Aleph, the awareness that God’s help is present - and he stands at 318, ready to defeat armies. The distance between hopelessness and victory is not a vast gulf. It is a single step, a single shift in outlook.
Modern physics points in a similar direction. In quantum mechanics, a particle such as an electron does not exist as a tiny solid ball with a definite location before measurement. Instead, it is described by a wave function, a spread of possibilities, a superposition of potential states. When a measurement is made, that spread of possibilities resolves into a single definite outcome. The wave of potential becomes an actual particle in an actual place. This is what physicists call the collapse of the wave function, and the “measurement problem" of exactly what this means remains one of the deepest unresolved questions in science.
Physicists debate how to interpret it, and we should be careful not to overstate what the equations say. “Observation" in the laboratory means a physical interaction with an instrument, not necessarily a conscious mind. Even so, the central lesson is undeniable and well tested: measuring does not merely record a finished reality. It actually takes part in forming the result.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shows that we cannot observe a system without disturbing it. Experiments such as the double-slit experiment show that the very same electron behaves as a wave or a particle, depending on how we choose to look at it. The physicist John Wheeler, who spent his career on these questions, spoke of a “participatory universe," one in which the observer helps bring reality into being.
The perspective with which we measure and look at things affects and shapes what we see. This is science, not mysticism. What the Torah’s law of lost objects expresses in the language of human attention, physics discovers in the language of particles.
We are not God. We do not control the weather, the markets, or the fate of nations. But we have been given a specific domain of power, the ability to choose where our attention rests and how we interpret what happens to us. God gave us free choice so that we would use it to shape the outcome.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, taught this principle repeatedly. If we do not give our fears attention, they do not become real in our lives. Even the superstitions mentioned in the holy books, he would say, have no hold over us if we refuse to give them importance. This is the same principle as the law of the lost dollar: what we have not granted our attention has not truly been surrendered.
The other side of the coin is equally true. As the saying goes, where focus goes, energy flows. If we dwell on our fears, we give them substance. If we dwell on despair, we give it a home. The law tells us that even something with every potential to be lost, to be gone, to be a cause for despair, is not truly lost until we give it that status.
And the Torah portion goes further. If we elevate our perspective and add just one more unit of effort, the faith in God hinted at in the name Eliezer, we can transform 317 into 318, turning defeat into victory.
Here is the takeaway.
Each of us faces moments when something slips away: a job, a relationship, a dream, our confidence. In those moments, we face a choice. We can look at the loss and declare it final, adding it to the account of despair. Or we can raise our perspective by a single unit, remember that we are never alone, and hold on to the possibility that the story is not finished.
Jewish law holds that as long as we do not despair, the object remains ours. Quantum physics holds that how we observe shapes what we see. Our Sages hold that one letter, one unit of faith, separates the despairing man from the redeemer of captives. These three voices, law, science, and tradition, speak in harmony.
We have tremendous strength and agency in how we view our lives. Let us not waste them on fear and despair. Let us use them for what is positive and constructive, adding that one small aleph to every situation, and discover how much of reality responds when we do.
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