Prayers From Rikers

Dear friends,

“My son plays soccer right over there,” Shira told us as she drove us into the parking lot on route to Rikers Island. She parked the car, and our small delegation of rabbis and activists picked up our passes that will allow us to drive over the bridge and enter the jail. The four of us, Shira, Rabbi Margo and Rabbi Becky from Truah and me had come, one week before Passover, to join the prayer services and teach Torah to the Jews who find themselves there. Back in the car we show our passes at the entrance to the bridge that goes over the water from Queens. As we drive across, I’m struck by the massive infrastructure that was built and maintained to create this jail. Across the bridge we’re stopped at a few other checkpoints to see our passes and finally allowed in.

It’s a sprawling place with a number of different facilities. We are going to the Anna M. Cross center, which houses approximately 2000 people. Pretty much everywhere you look on the island you see barbed wire, so much of it that in certain places it almost looks like an art exhibit. We find Rabbi Gabe and the rabbinical intern sitting at a small picnic table, and the four of us guests gather around. Gabe has been one of the three Jewish chaplains on the island for five years. The two of them give us some information about how things work there, describe the living conditions of the people incarcerated there. Most of them live in giant rooms with 50 other people. Those with acute mental conditions stay in a different part of the center in smaller rooms, and as soon as they show any sign of improvement, are sent back to the main dorms.

When we enter the Center we show our passes and our IDs, surrender our phones for safekeeping, go through an airport style metal detector and walk-through. Someone remarks that it feels like a high school other than the bars here and there. Rabbi Gabe describes the quarter mile long hallway that goes towards the dorms. He tells us that there are a few hundred incarcerated people on the island who identify as Jewish, but he doesn’t expect more than ten people at the prayer service, in part because there isn’t enough staff to escort people from the dorms over to the chapel. They used to be allowed to walk on their own sometimes, but that practice was ended during Covid and doesn’t seem like it will be restored. Staffing has been a serious problem there, which became impossible during Covid. This has resulted, in addition to certain limitations, in close to one preventable death in the jail every two weeks in the last few years.

We enter the chapel through the back door, near the small bookshelf they call the library. We marvel as Rabbi Gabe pushes the Jewish part of the ceiling-height three-part stage of sorts into place. The room changes from a church to a synagogue. Within a few minutes, the pews are filling up by around 10 people who came to pray.

Rabbi Gabe had mentioned that the center houses a lot of people with mental health issues, and indeed, this is quite clear about several of them the moment they sit down. We sit among them and say hello. A few of them had grown up in religious Jewish settings, some seem to have begun identifying themselves as Jews in Rikers, and others years earlier. They’re all there to pray, most with yarmulkes on their heads. I am struck by the openness with which they speak about their situation, sharing personal details, some even including their mental diagnoses. I am beginning to understand how important this one weekly prayerful gathering is for these people, who seem starved for meaningful conversation and connection.

As Rabbi Gabe begins the prayers, One of the more orthodox Jews, a sweet, young man named Chaim, parks himself in one of the corners, and begins to put on Tefilin. He invites anyone else who’d like to join him, offering to help them wrap them on. One does, and I watch Chaim lovingly take his friend through the ritual.

Rabbi Gabe leads us through the prayers. Ashrei, Shma, V’ahavta. He then pauses the traditional prayers, and invites people’s personal prayers. A couple hands of hands go up. A young African-American man, who had been talking to himself from the moment he sat down, speaks first. He delivers a heartfelt, straightforward and moving prayer. He asks for a more compassionate justice system. He prays for a particular procedure called Exam 930 to happen much, much earlier in the process. We will learn later that this is a procedure in which a person can be deemed mentally unfit to serve in jail or prison. “This should happen in the first interview,” he says. “For most people it doesn’t take more than a minute to see what their mental condition is like.”

John speaks next. “I was abused my whole life,” he opens. He shares that he suffers from ADD, ADHD, and severe depression. Rabbi Gabe gently offers a sentence or two to each one who speaks, saying things like “we don’t know the reason why we suffer, but I wish you that God spreads the shelter of peace over you.“ Avi tells us he was homeless before he was arrested. He speaks about being on the island for over five months and having trouble making friends, in part due to depression. Rabbi, Gabe tells him that he prays for him to find companionship and friendship. Drake speaks about meditation, and how he meditates often, during all kinds of situations, sometimes, as he walks through the hallways he is meditating. “You can meditate anywhere,” he offers.

We speak The words of Psalm 121. “I raise my eyes to the mountains, from where will my help come? My help comes from Adonai maker of sky and earth.” Then the Rabbi invites me to lead the teaching I had prepared. “There’s a line in the Haggadah, in which we are told that God heard us,” I tell them, and ask: “What does would it mean to be heard by God?” A lively discussion ensues about the different verbs used in the Haggadah: God hears the cry, God sees the suffering, God knows.

“God seeing me is like when I look at myself from the outside. God knowing me is more intimate, from the inside.” Drake has a different take: “God knows the totality, everything, and my minuscule place within it. God sees is a seeing of my particular situation.”

For half an hour we discuss, debate, listen and read until I invite them to close the discussion by reading together the blessing from the Amidah: “Blessed are you, Adonai, who hears our prayers.” Barukh Atah Adonai Shomea Tefilah.”

The guards announce that it’s time to go, and we say a warm goodbye to our study partners, who are genuinely appreciative of the fact that we came, of what we offered, of the time we shared together.

As we walk out, Rabbi Gabe flips the stage back towards the Christian side, and we walk back out to the hallway. We are passed by more groups of people in drab, brown outfits and officers in blue escorting them around. We receive our phones and IDs back and walk out, back to that same little picnic table on the grass under the barbed wire. We grapple together with questions of complicity, with the tremendous desire for change, with the question what victory might look like. Closing Rikers would be a good start, but those who work there know that even if and when that day will come, the carceral system will continue to act in painfully cruel ways to uphold the injustice present in our society at large. We speak about how clergy that work in these kinds of spaces need support, and what that support might possibly look like. Finally, we say goodbye, get back in Shira‘s car and drive over the bridge back to Queens. Looking at the airplanes taking off from LaGuardia. Just a short 10 minute swim from Rikers, I feel like that’s an especially mean touch, to place that jail right in front of the airport.

I walk out of this day with appreciation for those who work daily to offer support to the people living on the island. I feel the camaraderie of the many in the struggle who work against the odds to create a more caring world. I leave with some conclusions of the political and social type: Another way to work with people with mental problems exists. The mayor’s criminalization of mental health issues, and the many such people living on the streets is wrong. We do not have to be this cruel. But more importantly for me, I leave feeling like I have a lot to learn about prayer from people like John and Drake and Avi, and the rest of those beautiful, troubled people we met at Rikers. The sadness I felt as I heard their stories might be the beginning of a different kind of prayer, a real prayer, and it may even be the only kind of prayer that God can hear.

 
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha