Bonuses and Gifts in Purchasing, Part 2 - Rabbi Yisrael Meatuf shlita

00:02 Speaker 1 You’re listening to “Lema’an Yishme’u,” a podcast from Machon Halacha Chabad.

00:09 Speaker 2 Last week we started discussing someone who bought something for another person and received a gift or a discount. Do they split it or not? It was a little complicated. So, to make things clear, let’s take five practical cases and then analyze them based on what we learned. That will make it easier to remember. The first is “liquor from the neighboring town.” I’ve given each case a short name so we’ll remember it later. Someone was sent to buy liquor—Benedictine, I don’t know, something expensive, 150 shekels a bottle. He was sent to buy ten bottles for Simchas Torah, and he knows there’s a special sale in the neighboring town, thirty percent off or something like that. So he says to himself, “They sent me to buy it. Here in town it costs 150 shekels a bottle. Ten bottles is 1,500 shekels. I’ll travel to the neighboring town, buy it for 1,000 shekels, and the 500 shekels will be mine, because I went to the trouble of traveling there to buy it.” Is he really entitled to that? First, can he actually keep it? And second, does he have to tell them that he bought it for less, or can he say nothing and charge them the local price? Second question: a tip for a waiter. We mentioned last week that the Alter Rebbe says that any benefit an agent receives as a result of his agency must be split with the person who sent him. Does a waiter who receives a tip have to give half to the person who sent him? On the face of it, he received it because of his work. The person who sent him—say, the hall owner who brings in the staff, and they work there—perhaps he should give half to the hall owner. Third case: samples in a store. An agent is sent to buy several portions of falafel, and the shopkeeper gives him falafel balls and other things to taste. We understand that it doesn’t make sense for him to have to pay

02:30 Speaker 2 half their value to the person who sent him. But the question is why. If he has to split every benefit he receives through his agency with the person who sent him, perhaps he should split this too. Fourth case, which we mentioned last week: the donor, the agent, and the institution. Someone asked me about this just a week and a half ago; it’s a real case. A person donated a set of Rambam to a kollel. He gave someone the money and told him, “Go buy the set.” That person had—uh, I don’t know whether you’d call it a membership—some sort of account at the Yafeh Nof store. He’d paid twenty shekels and could earn points there, and he bought the set there. Initially, it hadn’t even occurred to him that there might be an issue. But he heard me talking about this with someone, so he asked me: “I’ve now earned points. Who do they belong to? Me, the donor, or the institution?” There are three parties here. Fifth case, which I call “the frequent flyer.” We also discussed it last time. An employee consistently bought tickets from the same airline, and because of that he accumulated enough points for a free ticket. Does it belong to him, to his employer, or do they split it? Okay, that’s the introduction. As for today’s class, first we’ll review the sources and what we learned last week. Then we’ll analyze the cases we’ve discussed. After that, time permitting, there are two very interesting questions. First, does the person whose money was used own the gift? In other words, they received an additional gift with the purchase. Must that gift go to the person who put up the money? I already mentioned this last week. Until now, we’ve been talking about someone who sends another person with money: “Take this money and buy it for me.” What if the agent pays out of his own pocket, and the other person pays him back

04:30 Speaker 2 afterward? Does that make a difference? And one last question: can an agent become a merchant? Take the case we mentioned earlier, of the person sent to buy liquor. In that version, he innocently said, “I’ll buy the liquor, and surely I can keep the entire difference.” But let’s consider someone who has already attended the class and learned the halachos. He then says to himself, “Okay, I know that if I buy it as an agent, I have to give everything to the person who sent me. So I’ll make a deal here. I have a business opportunity: I’ll buy it for myself for 1,000 shekels and then sell it to the person who sent me for 1,500. What’s the problem, seemingly?” So those last two cases are a little complicated. We’ll get to them if time permits. First, let’s review what we learned last week. The Gemara says that if a gift is received with a purchase, the person who sent the agent and the agent divide it: half to each. The question is why. What does Rashi say? Because we don’t know whom the seller intended to give it to. Did he mean the person standing in front of him, or the person who paid—the owner of the purchase? The Rif, and Tosafos too, say, “Since he benefited.” The agent received it, right? He got it in his hand. Even if the seller told him, “I’m giving this to you as a personal gift,” why did he receive it in practice? Because of the agency he was carrying out. Who sent him on that mission? The person who sent him. So they have to divide it half and half. That’s what the Rif says. There’s a third opinion that I didn’t mention last week: both their good fortune brought it about. We won’t get into that. The Alter Rebbe mentions only the first two opinions. So if I receive a gift while acting as an agent, then, first of all, if we don’t know whom it was meant for, they split it half and half. And even if we do know whom it was meant for,

06:35 Speaker 2 the Alter Rebbe rules that a G-d-fearing person should still split it half and half. Even if the seller says, “Take this for yourself,” a G-d-fearing person will nevertheless give half to the person who sent him. Why? Because he benefited through him. Last week we mentioned all the different levels of benefiting from someone else, benefiting without causing the other person a loss, and all those questions. Now, this was said about a gift. The question is how I define something: is it a gift, or is it simply a discount? We said last week that when it’s a discount, the discount always belongs to the person who sent the agent. It doesn’t go to the agent, because that person gave you money to make the purchase, and you used less than he gave you. He put a hundred shekels in your hand, and you used fifty. Who owns the remaining fifty in your hand? The person who sent you, not you. So how do we define whether it’s a gift or a discount? The Alter Rebbe distinguishes between a fixed price and a price that isn’t fixed. Nowadays, almost everything has a fixed price. You walk into a store and there’s a price, so there isn’t much to discuss. If the seller gives you an extra item on the spot—not an offer announced in advance, not a prearranged promotion—that’s definitely a gift, and they split it half and half. But with a price that isn’t fixed—like the example I gave of a clearance sale—someone comes in and is sold several items for one price. There isn’t a separate price for each item. It could also happen with vegetables before Shabbos, when the seller gives him several things together. In those situations, the price isn’t fixed. So I don’t call it an extra item. It isn’t an extra item; it’s a discount. He didn’t add something to the sale; he sold you the whole lot cheaply. That’s how we define it. From this, I conclude that all the promotions we have today, everything advertised in advance—

08:33 Speaker 2 buy one, get one free; spend a certain amount and get something; buy this and get that—all of it is generally included in what you’re paying for. You’re paying for it. So it isn’t a gift. Only gifts are divided between the agent and the person who sent him. If it isn’t a gift, it’s a discount, and the person who sent him gets it. As we said, it can’t be that he pays for it and you receive it. We discussed the example of buying a refrigerator and getting a mixer. If he’s paying for that mixer, why should the agent get half of it? The agent shouldn’t. Everything we said about splitting refers to an additional gift that’s given beyond the purchase. So here’s the summary in the form of a chart. If the price isn’t fixed, that means it isn’t an extra item; everything is included in the price. We’ll see in a moment how that works. So the additional item belongs to the person who sent the agent. If the price is fixed, there are two possibilities. If the seller gave it without saying whom it was for, then it’s certainly split half and half. If he said it was for the agent, the Alter Rebbe’s ruling is: “By the strict letter of the law, it belongs to the agent; a G-d-fearing person will give half to the person who sent him.” Okay? That’s the review. I hope it wasn’t too complicated. What?

09:53 Speaker 3 What does it mean for a price not to be fixed?

09:53 Speaker 2 When a price isn’t fixed, it’s really considered a discount. Because if the price were fixed and they added something, you’d say it’s an extra item, a gift. But if they added something and the price isn’t fixed, then everything is included in the price. So I say they sold it to you cheaply. I don’t say they added something.

10:12 Speaker 3 In practice, you said that all the buy-one-get-one offers are included—

10:16 Speaker 2 Usually, it’s a discount. Usually—

10:19 Speaker 3 You get both of them at a lower price.

10:20 Speaker 2 Exactly. Because usually you’re paying for it. It’s not really, uh, there’s no act of kindness here. When would these gifts be different? I gave examples then. Say a store opens and, to mark its opening, offers a gift with every purchase. You can see they don’t take into account how much you pay at all. You buy something for one shekel, ten shekels, a hundred shekels—you get a gift. They have a pile of gifts on the side and hand them out. So you can see that this is an extra gift.

10:46 Speaker 3 What if it starts at a certain purchase amount?

10:49 Speaker 2 If it starts at a certain amount, then it looks like you are paying for it.

10:55 Speaker 3 It’s just... because so there won’t be—this—when you add a certain amount, the payment is complete so there won’t be—

11:03 Speaker 2 It’s worth it to them. If you buy a certain amount, it’s worth it to them to give you the gift. I’m not saying there can’t be exceptions. It’s genuinely hard to calculate. Okay, before we move on, I think that if there’s time we’ll go over last week’s cases. I don’t want to go on too long. Let’s return for a moment to the cases we discussed earlier—the nearby town and all the rest. Let’s look at a quotation. Sorry. This is the Shach, in siman 345, in the section discussing gifts. He writes as follows in the name of the Maharashdam: “Someone who sends merchandise with his friend to another place, where customs duty is payable, and the messenger, through his cunning and ingenuity, gets it past customs.” Now, is that permitted or forbidden? That’s a subject in its own right. Broadly, it depends on whether the customs duty is lawful or not. There were—and even today there are—countries where the customs officer outright steals, charges double, and so on. In those situations, the Alter Rebbe rules that it’s all theft and one may get the goods past customs. But here it doesn’t matter so much whether it was permitted or forbidden, because ultimately, once he’s done it, you don’t need to pay it back. It’s considered withholding payment of a debt owed to a non-Jew. We discussed this in previous classes. The Torah says, “You shall not withhold what is due to your fellow, and you shall not rob.” When it speaks about robbery, it doesn’t say “your fellow,” because it’s forbidden to rob either a Jew or a non-Jew. But when it speaks about withholding payment—“You shall not withhold”—it says “your fellow.” As I said, “You shall not withhold” means you may not keep money that you owe and fail to return it. With a non-Jew, you may do so if it won’t cause a chillul Hashem. So if someone borrows money from a non-Jew, and the non-Jew passes away and the heirs don’t even know he borrowed that money, he doesn’t need to repay it. He can keep it, because

13:11 Speaker 2 it says, “You shall not withhold what is due to your fellow.” Here he got the goods past customs, so presumably, if he managed that, they don’t know about it, and he doesn’t need to pay. Now the question is: who does the money belong to? They sent the messenger with fabric, merchandise worth a thousand shekels, and the sender planned to pay another hundred shekels in customs duty. So let’s say he had already given the messenger the money. Now the messenger arrives, having gotten the goods past customs. So he says, “I want the money for myself. I did the work.” As it says here, “through his cunning and ingenuity.” And that’s similar to—

13:47 Speaker 4 The fabric and all the various expenses that... were supposed to come up.

13:53 Speaker 2 That the messenger saved. So the example we gave earlier was also through his cunning and ingenuity. He was sent to buy drinks, and he said, “They’re cheaper in the nearby town. I’ll go there. I went to the trouble. I did it.” Now he says this: “This is not a case of driving away a lion.” Driving away a lion is a halachic concept. There’s a mitzvah to save someone else from a loss. If you see someone else’s house on fire, or anything else about to be damaged, it’s a mitzvah for you to come and save him from the loss.

14:31 Speaker 4 The mitzvah of returning a lost object.

14:32 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, returning a lost object. “Any lost property of your brother’s” includes real estate. Now, if you’ll lose something by doing it—if you’re in the middle of work or will lose something else—you aren’t obligated. But if you won’t lose anything, you’re a person with no work or anything else to do right now, you have to go. The Alter Rebbe also introduces... It says that Rashbi spoke words of Torah and rain fell. Uh... What was I going to say? Driving away a lion. No, I wanted to say something. Yes, yes, I wanted to say something before that. Never mind. So now you’re obligated to go and save the other person. You can’t ask for money for it, because the Torah obligated you. That’s the concept of driving away a lion.

15:22 Speaker 4 Not a lion. It’s just, just an expression.

15:29 Speaker 2 If you see a lion approaching your friend’s flock and you drive it away, you’ve fulfilled a mitzvah from the Torah of returning a lost object. Can you go to him and ask to be paid for your work? No. You saved him from damage. So perhaps here, too, the owner—or the sender—could tell the messenger who got the goods past customs, “You fulfilled the mitzvah of returning a lost object. You saved me from a loss.” But he says no: this is not a case of driving away a lion, because the customs expense was certain.

16:01 Speaker 4 But where’s the line between a certain loss and—

16:04 Speaker 2 There’s a lengthy Tosafos that also deals with this whole sugya. It’s—

16:12 Speaker 4 I don’t understand what.

16:13 Speaker 2 Yes. There are many, many details about how to define what counts as driving away a lion and what doesn’t. Here, he says the customs expense was certain. Generally speaking, you could say, roughly, that there’s a sudden loss that comes upon a person and you save him from it, whereas here it’s the normal procedure: you arrive and pay customs. He came along and saved you the customs duty; he’s earned you money. The Shach says: “The messenger must be paid for the benefit he provided.” Notice what they were arguing about. The messenger said, “It’s mine,” and the sender said, “It’s mine.” What does the Shach say? Pay him for the benefit he provided. He did a job for you. How much do people pay for that job? That’s what you pay him. So find out what the going rate is for someone who gets another person’s goods past customs, and pay him that. In our case, it’s a little complicated.

17:00 Speaker 4 If there’s a million dollars here—

17:02 Speaker 2 No, then no. No, you can’t pay more—

17:05 Speaker 4 You could pay more than a hundred...

17:07 Speaker 2 Right, you can’t pay more than the benefit he received. Why not? Because, essentially, it’s like this concept: someone goes and—someone enters another person’s house and paints it for him. It happens that the house needs painting, okay? Let’s not get into other cases. He paints the house. Can he ask him for money or not? But the law says that when it’s done without permission, “his hand is on the bottom.” What does that mean? Either the expenses he incurred or the increase in value he created—whichever is lower. He can’t add thirty shekels of value for you and ask for two hundred shekels. That can’t be. So it’s the same here. On your own initiative, you did work and went to a lot of trouble. You spent a whole day traveling to Jerusalem to save one shekel on this item. Now you want to ask the sender to cover the cost of your trips to Jerusalem. You did something unreasonable. So “payment for the benefit he provided” means what people normally pay for that kind of job. But of course, that’s in a case where you actually saved more than that.

18:07 Speaker 4 But he risks going to prison. How can you put a value on that?

18:12 Speaker 2 People, if at that time...

18:14 Speaker 4 There are things—

18:15 Speaker 2 In principle, everything has a price, right? There’s even a price for whether a person would have his hand amputated with medication or without it, as we see in the Gemara. With anything, you can ask a person, “How much would you pay for this or that?” And today there are even mercenaries who are paid to risk their lives. So, returning to this case—the drinks from the nearby town—the law is that even though he went to the trouble, he gets the amount paid for that kind of effort. Today, it really is a bit harder to calculate. I traveled to the nearby town. That’s—

18:50 Speaker 4 A normal fee, if you hire someone—

18:53 Speaker 2 Travel expenses.

18:55 Speaker 4 If... Today there are a lot of, uh, drivers you can hire for all sorts of things.

19:00 Speaker 2 Yes.

19:01 Speaker 4 People generally hire someone to go to a nearby town to buy things.

19:04 Speaker 2 Yes.

19:05 Speaker 4 But why not take into account that the money he pays also has to be...?

19:09 Speaker 2 No, in principle—that’s a good point. The money certainly belongs to the sender. He sent you with fifteen hundred shekels. You went to buy the bottles and paid a thousand. You have five hundred left. You certainly return those five hundred shekels to the sender, but you tell him: “I did a job for you. You saved five hundred shekels because of me. You saved five hundred; my work is worth a hundred shekels—that’s the going rate. Pay me a hundred shekels.” So then I’d get four hundred from you. Of course, as we said, if the discount he gained is twenty shekels, then he can’t ask him for the money.

19:41 Speaker 4 Well, it could be twenty. All right.

19:43 Speaker 2 Twenty, yes, apparently twenty. Right. The expense or the amount of the increase in value, whichever is lower. Here the increase in value is lower, so that is what he should receive. Now, a tip for a waiter and a tip for a store employee are more or less the same thing. There is a formulation in the Ramban. Wait, I want to read it inside. The Ramban writes: “Anything given to the buyer that is not on account of the purchase and sale belongs entirely to the agent.” That is a straightforward ruling, right? But the Ramban states it explicitly. Even when we said that an agent who receives a gift shares it with the person who sent him in every case, it has to be because of the agency. If you can see that it was not because of the agency, not because of what he was sent to do, then it cannot be so. I’ll give an example: An agent walks into a store, and the seller says, “Wow, it’s your birthday today,” and gives him a gift. Would anyone suggest that he now has to split it fifty-fifty with the person who sent him? Of course not. He received a gift unrelated to the agency. He received a birthday gift. The agency is what brought him there. So what I’m saying is, it is not that because of the person who sent you, you happened to get there, and therefore he gets a share. That is not the idea. The idea is that you received a gift because of the agency. So if you made a purchase and received a gift on account of that purchase, you split it with him. But if the gift has nothing to do with the purchase, you do not split it with him. That is what the Ramban says. What follows from this? What we were just discussing. If I’m talking about a waiter’s tip—and there may be differences between cases—why do people give an ordinary tip to a waiter? Because of how he treated them. True, working there gives him the opportunity to receive it, but they are explicitly giving it for his manner and his service. And particularly nowadays, that is also part of the custom.

21:44 Speaker 2 Nowadays the custom is that it is part of his income. Sometimes there are even places where they receive no pay for the work. They come just to collect the tips and leave. In such situations, it certainly goes to the agent. But there are other cases. For example, there is a shliach in a certain city who pays several young men to go out and do mivtzoim every day, the mezuzah campaign. They are going around, and someone comes along and gives a hundred shekels to the fund and another hundred shekels directly to one of them. Now, you understand that he intended to give it to him. The very fact that he gave a hundred to the fund and a hundred directly to him is like saying that he is giving it to the agent. But why did he give it to him? He gave it for the service he performed here, not for his manner or anything like that. He gave it to him. It can be discussed, right? But broadly speaking, it is as though he actually gave it to the Chabad House, to the—

22:37 Speaker 5 The Chabad House is the fund.

22:39 Speaker 2 Yes, what I mean is that he gave it on account of the shlichus, because of the shlichus. There is a difference here. When someone comes to a place and knows the waiter is being paid, he says, “Here, take this for yourself, for the way you treated me.” Apart from what you are paid, take this for yourself. Here, he thinks this Chabad chossid has come and is doing it voluntarily, so he gives him the hundred shekels. In fact, he is not volunteering—

23:04 Speaker 5 If he were volunteering, then it wouldn’t be—

23:06 Speaker 2 If he were volunteering, then apparently, yes. Apparently, if a shliach sends you, who is the person really sending you? It is not the shliach. You come and do mivtzoim. Apparently, the whole concept of an agent and the person who sends him does not apply in a situation like that. But if he is being paid, then it is simply like any other agency. Now, samples in a store are the same idea. Samples are something offered to someone standing in the store to taste. Clearly, that is not some extra benefit belonging to the person who sent him that we should now start dividing up and giving him its value. It is something they might even let you taste if you were not buying anything, because they want you to... I don’t know how to define it, but it is not on account of the agency. It is because you came into the store. Something like that.

23:54 Speaker 5 There is no doubt that he did not intend it to go to the person who sent him.

23:56 Speaker 2 Yes, certainly not. But we said that even if he explicitly says he is giving it to the agent, the agent has to split it with the person who sent him. The question is whether this is that kind of thing. Apparently, there is a difference between a gift and a sample you taste on the spot. Now, the donor, the agent, and the institution. Here we already have three parties disputing the matter. Let’s recall the story. This is a real story, as I said. Someone took a thousand shekels out of his pocket and said, “Here, buy a set of Rambam and give it to your kollel.” That person went and bought it. He also had a membership at that store, so he earned points, and those points were later worth money. The question is whether he has to pay for what he gained. So let’s look at the principles we discussed. We still need to discuss the donor and the institution, but first let’s see. The principles we discussed concerning an agent and the person who sent him: First of all, what do we have here, a discount or a gift? These points that he accumulated.

24:56 Speaker 6 It is fixed in advance.

24:57 Speaker 2 Huh?

24:58 Speaker 6 It is a discount.

25:00 Speaker 2 True, it is fixed in advance, but here is what I mean. You see, it is not on this purchase. The whole idea of a discount is that you pay now, and your money covers this too.

25:15 Speaker 6 A future discount.

25:16 Speaker 2 What? Right, perhaps you are paying for that future discount. Okay, there is room to discuss that. Now, on the other hand, the agent is the one who belongs to the loyalty program; he even paid to join it. That counts as specifying that it is being given to the agent, because they only give it to members, not to everyone. So at least according to Rashi and the Rosh, they need to split it fifty-fifty. Right? Now, according to the Rif they also need to split it. I mean the other way around: According to the Rif they need to split it; according to Rashi, perhaps they do too, because it is fixed in advance. Now the question is: Who counts as the person who sent him here, the donor or the institution? This is what we discussed at the beginning of the previous class. We said, wait: When you buy something in a store for someone else, who does it belong to? You go to the store, take money out of your pocket, and buy something. Does it belong to your friend or to you? There are many practical halachic ramifications. You betrothed a woman with it in the street—just as an example; one must not betroth a woman in the street—but if you did, is she betrothed or not? That depends on who owns the item. What is the answer? In principle, when someone buys something, it belongs to him. But there are two ways it can belong to someone else. One is if that other person took the money out of his own pocket. Once he has done that, the seller, even though he does not know who paid, gives the item to the person who paid. That is a principle in halachah: He gives it to the owner of the money. So if, hypothetically, the institution had provided the money, it would certainly go to the institution. But here the donor contributed it on his own initiative. No one sent him to do it; he contributed it himself. In principle,

27:06 Speaker 2 not only does the gift belong to him, the set itself belongs to him too. Even though he decided to donate it, there was never a point at which it actually passed to the institution. So he has now bought the set of Rambam through an agent. The set comes into the agent’s hands, but it still belongs to the donor. Only once the agent takes it to the institution will it belong to the institution. Until then it is the donor’s in every respect. He thinks, “He bought it for me.” You say you bought it for me, but nothing actually happened to transfer it; it is yours. So the institution certainly has no part in this matter. It concerns the donor and the agent; the issue is between them. Now for the last case: the frequent flyer. An employee, say a kashrus supervisor, flies abroad a lot. The person who sends him always tells him to buy the tickets with his own credit card. He made sure to book with the same airline every time, accumulated points, and received a ticket. This case was brought before the Shevet Halevi, who gave the answer we have been discussing: Because this is part of normal commercial practice, it all goes to the person who sent him. The rabbi who asked the question had framed it in terms of the disagreement between Rashi and the Rif, splitting it fifty-fifty, and all that. The Shevet Halevi told him, “That has nothing to do with this case.” Why? Because this is normal commercial practice; it is part of the transaction, so everything goes to the person who sent him. But he says that if the person who sent him did not care at all which airline he flew with—he sent him to buy a ticket and did not care—and the employee was the one who, so to speak, made the effort to keep buying from a particular airline, then, as he writes, “The agent’s entitlement requires further discussion, but now is not the time.” And that is how he ends the discussion. Maybe he meant the point about payment for the benefit he provided. Perhaps that is what he means. Maybe. Now let’s move on to some other cases we discussed.

29:02 Speaker 2 We don’t have a presentation slide for this.

29:03 Speaker 7 What are we supposed to give him there?

29:05 Speaker 2 How? Based on what we said. First of all, those are the ways of commerce, so it all goes to the person who sent him. But if he made an effort and did something—he kept working to make it happen and had a particular conversation—he can say to the person who sent him, “I provided you with a benefit. Pay me whatever is customary.” I don’t know; it’s a little hard to calculate things like that when they aren’t standard jobs. Some percentage. I had a case where a broker—what?

29:31 Speaker 7 What percentage do brokers generally charge?

29:34 Speaker 2 Could be. I had a case where a broker sold my apartment for more than I had asked. He said to me, “How much do you want in your pocket?” and sold it for more. Now the question is about that difference. We discussed this too. The Ramban explicitly says that the entire difference goes to the person who sent him. Why? Because a house has no fixed price, and he sold your house for more. A person cannot do business with someone else’s cow. He cannot do business with your house. But he did provide a benefit here. He did something that benefited you, so it would be right to give him something. So when we asked about it at the time, we were told to give him a third, something customary.

30:17 Speaker 7 The same as the percentage he gets on the extra amount?

30:20 Speaker 2 What?

30:21 Speaker 7 The same as the percentage he gets on the extra amount?

30:24 Speaker 2 Of the profit he earned for you. You have to see whether he really earned you a profit.

30:27 Speaker 7 Say you wanted to sell it for a thousand. He sold it for twelve hundred, and you take your share of the thousand, right?

30:38 Speaker 2 Right, right. Besides that.

30:39 Speaker 7 The two hundred is his alone.

30:40 Speaker 2 The two hundred, he—

30:42 Speaker 7 It’s his? Why wouldn’t it be yours?

30:44 Speaker 2 Exactly. That’s what he thought, and that’s what halachah says.

30:48 Speaker 7 He did the work.

30:48 Speaker 2 Why did he do the work? So he made an effort. He says, “I’m the one who worked hard. I persuaded the buyer, I went looking, I made the effort.” That’s exactly the case we were discussing. Even if he made an effort, in the end, what did he sell? Whose house? My house, not his. He cannot do business with my house. But because he earned you a profit, he can ask, so to speak, for payment for that profit. Besides the brokerage fee that was agreed on, he can ask for whatever it is customary to pay someone for earning a profit like that. If I earn someone else a profit, how much do I get paid?

31:21 Speaker 7 But that’s not how people do it.

31:22 Speaker 2 What?

31:24 Speaker 7 That’s not how people do it.

31:25 Speaker 2 Then what they do isn’t right. Now, the two cases we discussed at the beginning—we called them the owner of the money and the owner of the se’ah. Does it make a difference who takes the money out of his pocket? This is interesting. There’s a major disagreement among contemporary halachic authorities. That same rabbi we mentioned earlier, who asked the Shevet HaLevi, wanted to say that it makes a difference whether the worker paid out of his own pocket or the person who sent him gave him the money. The Shevet HaLevi says, “That doesn’t matter. Why should I care? In the end, who will pay out of pocket? The person who sent him. What difference does it make who paid just now? For a short time, the shliach paid out of his own pocket. Later he’ll be reimbursed.” He said there’s no difference. But there’s another halachic authority, Rabbi Spitz, in Mishpetei HaTorah, who writes that there is a difference. He says, after all, what does it say? Who gets half? The Rif says half goes to whom? Half to the shliach and half to the owner of the money. So who is the owner of the money? The shliach just paid out of his own pocket; he’s the owner of the money. The seller in the store who’s offering the—running the promotion: what is he deciding? Whether he’s giving the gift to the person who came into the store to buy, or to the person who paid the money and brought him the profit. Well, who brought him the profit? The shliach. Who came to buy? The shliach. So he should—that’s why he says the shliach should get all of it. It’s an interesting disagreement, and I’ve seen several contemporary authorities—all of them follow the Shevet HaLevi. They all say that the person who sent him gets it, not the shliach. And they rely on something the Nesivos said. The Nesivos makes a very good point. He says that the moment the shliach

33:08 Speaker 2 gives the money to the seller, can the person who sent him then come and say, “Fine, keep it for yourself. What? I didn’t borrow money from you”? He sent him to buy a bottle of liquor for 150 shekels, and afterward he says, “I don’t need that liquor.” The shliach paid with his own money, bought it, and comes to the person who sent him and says, “Here, take the bottle.” He says, “No, I don’t need it. Keep it for yourself.” Can he say that? He can’t say, “Keep it for yourself,” when the shliach says, “I bought it for you.” So how did it become his? The Nesivos explains it this way: At the moment he paid, a halachic principle applies: “Give a maneh to so-and-so, and I’ll give you the field”; “I’ll become betrothed to you.” We have various cases like this in halachah. The moment he gave the money to the seller, the person who sent him became indebted to him. Now he owes the shliach money, as though it were a loan. It’s as though the shliach lent him the money. So who actually paid the seller? The person who sent him paid the seller. The shliach only performed the technical act, but he paid on behalf of the person who sent him. Because the moment he received that bottle of liquor, it belonged to the person who sent him. If an accident happens now and it breaks, I wouldn’t say that the person who sent him can tell the shliach, “It broke—your bottle broke.” That’s not right. From the moment he received it, it belonged to the person who sent him. So who paid? The person who sent him paid. That’s what most of the later authorities say. Now, on its own, that’s very persuasive. But the Alter Rebbe writes, “One who gives money to his shliach.” That’s the wording he uses. I don’t know what

34:45 Speaker 2 he intends us to infer, or whether he intends us to infer anything at all, but in all the cases he brings, he’s talking about a situation where someone gives money to his shliach. When the shliach pays out of his own pocket, I don’t know what the Alter Rebbe holds. There’s room to discuss and analyze it, but it’s a disagreement among the later authorities. Now for the last case: the shliach who wants to become a merchant. Until now he was an innocent shliach who wanted to do someone a favor. Suddenly he discovered a business opportunity and wants to become a merchant. Let’s use the example of the bottles of liquor again. He received 1,500 shekels to buy ten bottles. He knows that in the neighboring town they cost 1,000 shekels. He says, “I’ll buy them for myself for 1,000 and then sell them to him for 1,500.” Is that permitted or forbidden? Let’s divide it into two possibilities. One is that he takes the money the person who sent him gave him and uses it to buy them. That is certainly forbidden, because Mar Tzedek Gaon says that a shliach who has money in his possession for the purpose of his mission may not use it. That’s different from someone entrusted with money for safekeeping. If someone is given money to hold, then, um, nowadays everyone is considered like a money changer and may borrow from it, and so on. We won’t get into that; we discussed it in earlier classes. But if you’re a shliach, sent to take this money and pass it on to someone or use it for a transaction, you cannot use it for yourself. So that shliach may not use the money. After all, when he buys the bottles of liquor for himself and then sells them to you, he is effectively taking the money and using it for himself.

36:17 Speaker 8 If he doesn’t want to [unclear].

36:20 Speaker 2 What?

36:20 Speaker 8 He doesn’t want to [unclear], he doesn’t.

36:23 Speaker 2 Ah, the profit goes to that, and then you exchange it.

36:28 Speaker 8 There, it was a mistaken transaction.

36:32 Speaker 2 Look, the issue of exchanging—

36:34 Speaker 8 In jobs.

36:36 Speaker 2 The issue of exchanging money—where at that moment you say, “I’m exchanging this for that”—the halachic authorities are more lenient about that, although the Tzemach Tzedek seems to imply that even this is a problem.

36:46 Speaker 8 That’s the case.

36:47 Speaker 2 Yes. What I’m saying is, no, that ruling of the Tzemach Tzedek—there’s another ruling of the Tzemach Tzedek that discusses an exchange. It seems to imply that even that is a problem, but many halachic authorities are lenient about an exchange. I don’t know what to say about that. It’s a good question. Now—

37:00 Speaker 8 No, no, no, wait, wait.

37:04 Speaker 2 Ah, the other way around. Right.

37:05 Speaker 8 That’s something that...

37:06 Speaker 2 Yes, right.

37:07 Speaker 8 Who knew there was a difference?

37:10 Speaker 2 Yes. Now, he certainly can’t use the money he was sent with. The question is, what if he says, “I won’t use his money. I’ll use my own.” He sent me to buy it for 1,500; I’ll buy it for 1,000 and sell it to him for 1,500. So here, it would seem we need to make a distinction. If he simply sent you to buy something and didn’t tell you how much to pay—“Buy me some bottles of something”—imagine you get to the store and there are two identical bottles. One is on sale and the other isn’t. As his agent, are you allowed to buy the more expensive one instead of the cheaper one? After all, he sent you. As long as it doesn’t involve extra trouble, you’re supposed to carry out the errand in the best way possible. You’re not supposed to pay more when you can pay less. So when you get to the store and see that it’s cheaper, you’re supposed to buy it for him at the lower price. If you now buy it cheaply for him—buy it cheaply for yourself and sell it to him at a higher price—that’s like seeing both the cheaper and more expensive products in the store and buying the expensive one for him. That’s not what he sent you to do. You can’t do that without asking him.