What happens then if he loses some money in sand dunes?
There is little likelihood of finding coins in such a quantity of sand. But we see him bring a sifter and patiently sift the sand around the spot where he lost his coins. Is this to be construed as an expression of his not losing hope of recovering the coins which are therefore still considered his property? The Sage Rava ruled that the one who finds those lost coins in the sand dunes may keep them. His reasoning: The possibility of finding the lost coins even with a sifter is so remote that we assume with certainty that he has despaired of recovering them and they therefore belong to their finder. His motivation for bringing the sifter is his calculation that just as he lost money in the sand dunes there is a good chance that other people also lost items of value, and perhaps he will make up his own loss by finding what others have lost.
