[Avodah] Hashavat Aveida or Lifnei Iver?

[Joshua Meisner]

A poster on Areivim posted a link to an article regarding a recent psak by
R' Nissim Karelitz that "if one discovers a non-kosher cell phone and knows
who the owner is, and knows for a fact or has a reason to suspect the owner
uses the phone for prohibited access, one is not compelled to fulfill the
mitzvah of ‘hashovas aveida’".  The poster attempted to extrapolate to a
general rule that there's no mitzvah to return a non-kosher object.

This is not necessarily the case.  R' Elyashiv is cited in Mishpat HaAveidah
259, M.Tz. 3:7 (cited by R' Yechezkel Feinhandler in _Hashavas Aveidah
KaHalacha_)  that if one finds a davar asur such as a garment that is not
tzanua, non-kosher food, or an admission ticket to a place that is assur, he
is still obligated to return the object.  If the ba'alim are chashudim to
use the object, he should sell it to an aku"m and return the value of the
object to the ba'alim.  However, he notes (267, M.Tz. 1) that if the
admission ticket is only usable by the original owner, he should not sell it
to an aku"m and need not return it.

It appears that the p'sak of RNK would be concordant with the psak of RYSE
if it were impossible to sell a cell phone to an aku"m (the reality of cell
phone contracts coupled with the scarcity of non-Jews in Bnei B'rak may,
indeed, make this the case), but it may not be an across-the-board rule.  I
find it interesting that both TYW's cite of RNK and RYF's cite of RYSE both
imply that one *need not* return the phone, rather than not being *allowed*
to return the phone, which would seem to imply that the concern is not one
of unadulterated lifnei iveir, but I'd be hesitant to make this sort of
diyyuk from secondhand sources.

Joshua Meisner
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20090318/c541b191/attachment-0001.htm>