Passover in Prison

Or Lit Up

Passover in Prison

I breezed into the prison, fully familiar by now with the entry rituals. This is a high security prison and generally the guys there are not moved around until they are on ther way out.

Some of the members of the group I did not know well. Some of them were not so verbal, they came to every session they were paying attention but they didn’t speak. One of the more dependable and more talkative members was “in the hole.” He had gotten into some trouble. This also happened frequently. What’s the hole like, I asked, and several of them snickered in that way that obviates conversation and they never really did answer my question. Finally someone said, sometimes better sometimes worse. Sometimes it’s awful.

One of the guys here is the informal leader of the group and he somehow selects who gets to attend. He screens for the serious students I think, but he’s not overly discerning. I don’t get into who gets to participate. So far all the guys who show up seem serious to me.

We were in the counting of the Omer period and I brought with me a page on the description of the Omer and connecting it to a writing prompt. In the prompt I asked them to keep a kind of journal based on the energies that were associated with the seven weeks of the Omer; seven weeks, seven energies. I told them about Rebbe Nachman’s notion that to pay attention to the sefirotic energies of the Omer period is to align oneself with G*d’s blessed will.

I mentioned the idea that we were in between the freedom from and freedom for period, freedom from the limitations of Mitzrayim [Egypt] not yet arrived at freedom for the receiving of Torah [durable wisdom]. I mentioned that the gift of Torah represented freedom in the form of teaching, wisdom, a guidebook for living.

I asked them how do they find their freedom, both inner and outer, in the place where they live? They live in prison I am thinking maybe this was too much a stretch. Once I started talking I wondered whether I should have brought up the subject at all. I didn’t feel like they were engaged.

One fellow explained to me he doesn’t like to leave a paper trail about anything. It wasn’t safe. He was telling me he didn’t want to write. Another fellow said he used to write poetry but he can’t find the peace to do that in the last few years. He listens to music now, he said. Another said he used to play the saxophone but of course no more. I can play most anything, he said.

There was one man there who kept quiet but on his face he wore a kind of smirk I couldn’t read. He wrote something down on a paper he pulled out of a thick folder of papers he was carrying, showed it to the guy sitting next to him who was jabbering away about what he used to do to find his freedom.

The quiet man was not well known to me. He was one of the more reticent and recent members of the group. To me he also had a forbidding look, street look, youngish, long hair sticking out of a knit cap.

We had discussed freedom before in the prison, in the context of Passover and the Seder that we held every year, in the context of a dozen teachings many of which reflected back to their experience which was dominated by the subject of freedom, the loss of it, the recovery of whatever can be recovered in such a place. They live in prison.

As I was speaking with the more verbal members about how they make freedom for themselves where they live and in the background wondering if I should have brought up the subject, the quiet man sat silently with the look on his face that was challenging me, it looked like a warning to the others in the group: don’t go there. Be careful. I read into it caution about the subject I had opened up. Freedom.

The vibe didn’t feel right to me and those who were responding were responding superficially and without their usual depth. The conversation was veering off into a realm we hadn’t spent much time in: irrelevance.

What the heck, I looked at the man with the ambiguous smirk and I asked him flat out: how do you find your freedom here?

Without hesitation he answered: I study. And he pulled out of his folder a stack of papers, he had written all over them. He lit up and I could see that he was preoccupied with a prayer from a certain prayer book I was not that familiar with. The text used an asterisk as a convention for a certain grammatical feature that he had been trying to decipher. What’s that star . . . he asked me. His teacher had been transferred to another facility and he had no one to ask.

He offered up some explanations before he asked but the explanations he gave to the asterisk were wrong. I looked at the text and figured out what the asterisk meant and I began to explain to him a subtlety of Hebrew grammar -- what the asterisk signified that would not come up until graduate school in Semitic languages. He understood completely, but his misunderstanding of the asterisk meant he pronounced many words wrong and didn’t understand something about the language that few people do unless one is deep into this study.

Once I explained it and we started to read the prayer, I corrected him and in a moment he was pointing out where the text itself had made a mistake with the asterisk, and there were many mistakes made with the placement of the asterisk, as if it were added to the text by an uninformed editor without nearly as much attention that the two of us were now giving it.

This is it for me, he said. Study. I could see he meant it. He was lit up with the knowledge that I had filled in about the star, the asterisk. He was so delighted in the clarity I brought to him that he opened up like a human flower, lost the heaviness I had assumed in his demeanor, and I heard him say, this is how I go free.

This is how I go free, he said again. I study. It was the last thing I expected to hear from him.

I learned again something I learn every time I go there:

I think I know but I don’t.

I think I know but I don’t.

Keep my eyes open and my big mouth shut.

I think I know but I don’t.