So, this really happened.
Some years ago, my young cousin was on a United Synagogue Youth trip to Israel. While she was there, the group went north to tour the grottoes at Rosh HaNikra.
Alas, while taking photographs, she dropped her camera into the water.
She called her mother, heartbroken, and they both concluded the camera was irretrievably lost.
A month after her return to the States, my young cousin got a package.
It contained her camera.
What had happened?
Apparently, there were Israel Defense Forces soldiers on maneuvers, off the Mediterranean Coast — not far from Rosh HaNikra.
A skin diver found the camera, sitting at the bottom of the sea.
He opened the camera; took out the card; saw photographs of kids wearing USY Minneapolis T-shirts; contacted USY in Minneapolis; asked if anyone who had been on an Israel trip had lost a camera; located her — and that was how my cousin got her camera back.
Perhaps this would have happened anywhere.
But, to me, it is the sort of thing that makes you say: "Rak b'Yisrael. Only in Israel."
Why? The mitzvah is called hashavat aveidah — returning lost objects.
It is a Jewish obsession. There is an entire section of the Talmud that covers this subject.
There, we read that in the ancient Temple, there was a chamber to which people would bring stuff they had found, and people would search there for what they had lost.
A midrash says every tribe of Israel had a particular job to do. The tribe of Dan had the job of tagging along after all the other tribes to find lost objects they might have dropped along the way.
As we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, let us ask ourselves:
What had the Jewish people lost?
And, what did the state of Israel help them find again?
