A messenger of the court who delivers a court summons is believed to say that the defendant refused to come, and the court can excommunicate him based on that. But for money matters, two witnesses are required.
One may not change his larger coins into smaller coins that are known to be stolen. One may not take charity from stolen money – because it encourages the thieves to steal since they erroneously believe that giving stolen money to charity justifies their wrongdoing and exempts them from compensating the owner. Examples are money from unjust arbitrary customs and tax collectors, who bought rights to collect what they want.
Art: Charity by Fernando Botero
2 comments:
By this argument, are charities that got Madoff money giving it back? Should they?
Of course, one can't avoid thinking about Madoff with this Mishna, and I couldn't avoid it either.
Strictly speaking, the Mishna is only saying that they should not accept it from him now. For example, those valuables that he was mailing after the confession, they should be returned to the Madoff victims' fund.
The monies accepted from before are more problematic. There is a change of ownership, but did the owners despair to get back the money which was given to charity? My guess would be that they did – knowing that the charities will most likely not return the money. It is a bit of a vicious circle: since the nature of the owners of those charities is such that they won't return the money, the owners despair, and therefore the money doesn't need to be returned – but it sounds true to me.
By the way, I am now posting on the LiveJournal also. If you want, you can join and read it there, or though RSS. My idea is that LiveJournal is more of a community, and thus you will have more people to discuss with. If you do, you can post this question for starters. There are already 16 members and more than 20 watching it.
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