IT IS MY PROBLEM

At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States Post Office employed a remarkable woman whose work required detective instinct, linguistic brilliance, an encyclopedic knowledge of geography, and an almost supernatural ability to grasp what other people meant.

Her name was Patti Lyle Collins, and she rose to head Washington’s wonderfully named Dead Letter Office.

The Dead Letter Office was where mail went when everybody else had given up. Any letter addressed to nonexistent towns, mangled streets, or destinations spelled phonetically by immigrants who had heard a place named but never seen it written, ended up there. By the 1890s, the office handled as many as 23,000 undeliverable pieces a day.

And some of the addresses were magnificent. One envelope was addressed to “Lacy Jane.” There was no Lacy Jane – Collins worked out that the sender meant La Cygne, Kansas. Another said “Quincy Steep,” which Collins recognized as somebody’s phonetic attempt at Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan.

Then there was “Giuvani Cirelili, Presidente Sterite, Catimoa.” Most people would have stared at that for a while and reached for the trashcan. Collins saw “Presidente Sterite” and knew Baltimore was the only city in America with a President Street, and “Catimoa” was the sender’s confused version of Baltimore.

Collins became famous as a “blind reader,” although there was nothing wrong with her eyesight. She knew languages, street names, towns, industries, regional peculiarities, and the way different nationalities reproduce English sounds in writing.

She handled around a thousand problematic letters a day and became celebrated enough that countless articles were written about her — and she wrote some herself, one titled “Why Six Million Letters Go Astray Every Year.” The Smithsonian preserves an album of solved blind readings, envelopes that were rescued after reaching the end of the road.

There is something wonderfully touching about this. Behind every ridiculous address was someone trying to reach somebody else. A mother writing to a son. A husband writing to a wife. Someone sending payment. A friend sending news. And somebody, somewhere, waiting anxiously for a letter that never arrived.

To everyone else, the envelope was defective. To Patti Collins, it was unfinished business. And it is this distinction that lies at the heart of a deceptively simple mitzvah in Parshat Ki Teitzei. The Torah says (Deut. 22:1): לֹא־תִרְאֶה אֶת־שׁוֹר אָחִיךָ אוֹ אֶת־שֵׂיוֹ נִדָּחִים וְהִתְעַלַּמְתָּ מֵהֶם הָשֵׁב תְּשִׁיבֵם לְאָחִיךָ – “You shall not see your brother’s ox or sheep straying and ignore them; you shall surely return them to your brother.”

Two verses later, the obligation broadens: וְכֵן תַּעֲשֶׂה לְכָל־אֲבֵדַת אָחִיךָ… לֹא תוּכַל לְהִתְעַלֵּם – “So shall you do with anything your brother loses and you find—you may not ignore it.”

The mitzvah is familiar enough. Someone drops something, you find it and look for the owner. But Rashi notices something far more interesting in the wording. What does “vehit’alamta” actually mean? Rashi explains that it is describing a person who “presses his eye shut as though he does not see it.”

It is an extraordinary psychological observation. The Torah is not talking about blindness. It is talking about someone with perfectly good eyes who forces them closed — which makes Collins the exact inverse of Rashi’s offender.

She was called a blind reader, yet she was the one person who refused to be blind. Meanwhile, everyone else had looked at those envelopes and pressed their eyes shut.

There is a moral chasm between failing to notice something and arranging so that we don’t notice it – and we are remarkably skilled at the second. We cross the street. We look the other way. We tell ourselves somebody else will deal with it. Once we decide something is not our responsibility, we become astonishingly talented at not seeing what is directly in front of us.

Rabbeinu Bachya actually expands the mitzvah far beyond a wandering donkey. Whenever a person can provide some benefit to another, or spare them a loss, the obligation applies — because it is part of the broader Torah ideal: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Returning lost property is an expression of loving your fellow as yourself, which changes the mitzvah completely. It is no longer about objects at all. It is about refusing to cultivate indifference.

There is also a lovely detail buried in the wording. In the Hebrew, it does not say “do not ignore it.” It says, “you must not be able to ignore it.” Which is an odd sort of instruction. You can tell somebody what to do. But can you really tell them what they must not be capable of doing?

Evidently you can, because the Torah is not addressing a particular action here – it is addressing a particular kind of person. And Rabbeinu Bachya takes it one step further, to a truly beautiful place. The word the Torah picks for the straying animal is “nidachim” – banished.

It is a loaded word, and Rabbeinu Bachya finds in it a hint of something unexpected: the resurrection of the dead. Because in the end, God is the One returning lost property. Every soul that ever went missing will be restored to its owner, and the banished will not stay banished forever.

Which recasts the whole mitzvah. When we come across a fellow Jew who has wandered off from where they ought to be, refusing to write them off is not sentimentality, and it is not just warm communal feeling.

The reason we do not give up on the lost is because God does not give up on the lost. Rabbeinu Bachya says it plainly: you should never look away, because God never looks away.

Which is why the limits matter, and the Torah is more realistic than we tend to be. Rashi himself, in his very next comment, cites the Talmudic sages as saying that there are times when circumstances genuinely exempt you, even if you do see it.

And history bears out the same truth. For all its brilliance, the Dead Letter Office was only able to deliver just about forty percent of what reached it; the rest was pulped or sold as scrap. Collins was the greatest practitioner alive, and most letters still failed to reach their destination.

And yet, she kept going anyway, because success was never the ultimate measure. Where another clerk saw nonsense not worth their time, Collins saw a human being trying to make contact. The badly addressed envelope was not dead, it had simply become lost.

And her genius was not the deciphering, it was her refusal to accept that distorted handwriting meant the connection no longer mattered.

We live in a world that makes it easier than ever to avoid other people’s problems. We face so many appeals, so much suffering, so many claims on our attention, that some filtering is unavoidable. Nobody can solve everything.

But there is a difference between knowing our limitations and training ourselves not to care. We will not always be able to return what was lost, but the Torah’s demand is that we never become experts at looking away.

Patti Lyle Collins became famous because she could read what everyone else had written off as unreadable. But her real talent was simpler: when something hopelessly lost landed on her desk, she assumed that somewhere a person was still waiting for it, and that finding them was her job.

Ki Teitzei asks us to cultivate that instinct. The world is full of things — and people — that others have marked undeliverable. Our task is to refuse to call them dead letters.