Would you sell your dog in order to save money?
Let me spell out the hypothetical: Your dog becomes dangerous, biting people and damaging goods. The law in Judaism is that if an animal gores three times – after the owner has been warned each time to watch the animal, yet it became uncontrollable – the owner must pay full damages. Yet the first two times, the owner only pays half the damages.
However, if a person sells their animal so that now it is in a new owner’s hands, the law reverts back to a “natural” statute and the animal is not considered dangerous any longer.
In essence, you are not selling your dog to save a few dollars, but to save your dog from having the “title” of a “wild dog,” at the expense of losing ownership. Sometimes, out of love for your animal, it is worth giving up ownership so that you can protect the animal’s dignity.
If the dignity of an animal can be reversed, how much more so can the animal within each of us be reversed!
It is explained in Chasidic philosophy that each and every one of us has two souls, a G-dly soul and an animal soul. At times our animal soul can get “out of hand” and must be given away. In practical terms this means that we can transform our “animal soul” into a more G-dly soul by pressing the “reset” button.
Perhaps we cannot just “give away” our soul … but we can put in the effort to better ourselves and to utilize our time and energy on good things, even holy things, especially when our animal soul comes knocking.
Shabbat Shalom.