Chapter 1: What common borrowing scenario is discussed in this episode?
start okay so uh the following shayla comes up all the time particularly with people around your age um when you are learning in israel uh let's imagine ruven is an american yeshiva bacher uh in i don't know mevs let's say and uh he has what right okay and he has a friend uh who's also in yeshiva with him and uh ruven is friend shimon and ruven wants to borrow uh money from his friend shimon so uh
He borrows, I don't know, 100 shekel from his friend Shimon. And he says, when we get back to you, it's like right before Beit HaSaman, when we get back to the United States, I'll pay you back. Or I'll have, you know, I'll Venmo you from my account, which is all going to be in dollars that he's going to be paying him back. So is there any halachic problem with that? And how do you do that?
Like which exchange rate do you use? The day of the loan? The day of the returning of the loan? How do you avoid ribbous problems when you're borrowing in one currency and and you're returning money in another currency. Just curious, by show of hands, does this happen to anybody here? Yeah, so it happens all the time, right? Okay, so a little bit of background.
So first, some very basic background. The Torah asks for ribbis. Good. There's an entire parakh or two in Masech B'Av Messiah. Getting a lot of ribbis, Shaila, now, because Daphne just finished B'Av Messiah, so everyone's freaking out about, is everything I do ribbis? Because if you just read the Gemara, everything sounds asr.
So, but generally speaking, on the most basic level, you can't borrow $100 and repay $120. You can be neither the borrower, nor the lender, nor the ADIM, nor the ARAVE. It's all usher to be involved in such a loan. However, if you, let's say, want to borrow a pound of sugar and you return one and a half pounds of sugar, that you would imagine shouldn't be a problem, but it is also usher.
I'm sorry, that would be a problem, and you would imagine it would be a problem. However, if you wanted to borrow a pound of sugar and return a pound of sugar, you would imagine that should not be a problem. You're returning exactly what you're borrowing. So you would think that that would be perfectly fine. However, Chazal assert even doing that. And the reason is as follows.
When there's inflation or deflation, which is always happening, that there's always, usually it's inflation, but there's always... There's always, you know, the markets are, the value of the dollar is always moving. The buying power of a dollar is always moving.
You know, typically when you work for a big company, let's say, when you get a raise, they'll tell you, we'll raise you the rate of inflation plus, meaning the baseline has to be the rate of inflation. Because if you make $100,000, and it used to be that $100,000 could buy you X, and now you need $120,000 to buy X, so then those $100,000 are not worth what they used to be worth, right?
This is just basically the concept of inflation. So whenever we have inflation, that halacha always considers currency to be the stable thing, not to be fluctuating, and everything else is fluctuating. Meaning it's not that the dollar is cheaper, it's that everything got more expensive, right? That's the way we view it. The dollar is the dollar, and everything else just got more expensive.
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Chapter 2: What halachic issues arise when borrowing in one currency and repaying in another?
We assume that whatever the currency is, currency is currency. That doesn't change. That's considered to be something that is absolutely stable. Even though the $100 you return might have, if there was deflation, more buying power than the $100 you borrowed.
Chapter 3: Which exchange rate should be used for repayment?
However, if you borrow anything other than currency, you borrow food or sugar or flour or whatever from a neighbor or something. So then there's concern that in the interim, there may have been inflation and those goods increase in value. So if you repay the same amount of those goods, you're actually paying interest because those actually change in value. Only the dollars stay stable.
but everything else changes in value. So if a pound of flour, when I borrowed it, I have no idea what a five pound bag of flour cost, but let's say a pound of flour when I borrowed it cost $2 and then I returned a pound of flour and it costs $3 at the time that I return it, that is a problem of ribis, because that same pound of flour is worth a very different amount of money at that time.
So if you borrow a pound of flour from a neighbor, and you return it a week later, and in the interim the price of flour increased, returning the pound of flour is repaying the loan with something that's worth more than the original loan. And that is what we call ribis. So this is what Chazal referred to as sa'a b'sa'a. It's a nisidra banan of ribis.
They're not allowed to borrow something and return that very same item in return. So in general, Chazal do not allow you to borrow anything other than currency, because the value may increase before the payment of the loan, and that's going to be a problem. However, there are two Kullas that are built into this Isr of Saha B'Sahab. First is if you know that the price is stable.
Then it's going to be Mutzer, because then you don't have to worry about price increase if somehow you know in advance that the price is going to remain stable. Second of all, if the second Kulla is if the borrower, at the time that he borrows, has some of the item that he's borrowing in his own house at the time of the loan, then it's also mutter.
Meaning, I could borrow a pound of flour if I at least have some flour in my home at the time of the loan, because it's considered that the exchange is happening for that flour at that moment, where the price is at a set point, and I'm just delivering it to you a week later when I pay back. But that's the second kula. So where does this leave us when it comes to currencies?
Why am I even talking about sabasag? Currency isn't flour. It's not sugar. What are we even talking about? So most posts are of the opinion that foreign currency that's not readily usable in the country that you are, where the loan is taking place, is considered to be like flour or sugar. It's considered to be goods. It's not considered to be currency. Currency has a set value.
foreign currencies that aren't used as currency where you are now is like any other product. It's not considered to be currency. So to borrow American dollars in Israel would be asr unless the borrower owns at least one American dollar of his own.
They say that B'Shem Rav Eliashiv that American dollars in Israel is actually a terrible example of this because American dollars in Israel actually can be used as currency in many different contexts. A lot of times people prefer American dollars.
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