[Avodah] Lashon Hara about non-Jews

[Michael Makovi]

> "Charging interest and failing to return lost property are not negative
> actions, which come from or could engender bad middos.  They are the
> normal way we should expect to interact with strangers... And if someone
> has been careless enough to lose something and you were lucky enough to
> find it, why on earth should you expend time and energy to track them
> down, and then give it to them?  What have they ever done for you, that
> you should do them such favours?"
>

Charging interest being an okay thing, I would question. Given that
money in the time of the Torah's giving was primarily for emergency
situations and not for ordinary daily spending (and thus charging
interest would be to charge someone in davka the time of his financial
struggles), and given that it is prohibited (at least Rabbinically) to
pay interest to a gentile (though we follow Tosoafot in not keeping
this prohibition anymore), it seems difficult to say that charging
interest is morally fine. Now, on business matters, I see no problem -
and apparently Chazal didn't either, since they created the heter
iska. But notice that he heter iska is forbidden for personal
household type transactions - it seems to me that Chazal felt that
morally, it would be wrong to use a heter iska to permit interest for
necessary household goods. Only for non-necessary (i.e. business)
transactions did Chazal permit interest.

As for finding lost objects: to find and keep is the ordinary moral
way? Can one honestly suggest that there is no intrinsic moral problem
with finding and keeping? Is this idea not davka what the Torah comes
to tell us is false? Are we really meant to look at the mitzvah of
returning lost property, as a chok without any rationale or lesson for
our living? Even the "ritual" mitzvot have some sort of symbolic
meaning behind them, and yet we are to suggest that returning lost
property has no meaning whatsoever?

Mikha'el Makovi