³⁵ for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; ³⁶ I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.’ ³⁷ "Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? ³⁸ When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? ³⁹ Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ ⁴⁰ And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’

I’m not naturally inclined to prayers printed in books. I sit in the back of my synagogue most Shabbats an Orthodox shul on New York’s Lower East Side. I wrap myself in my tallit and read Thich Nhat Han and Jeanette Winterson. I stand when others stand, I sit when they sit. I listen when the rabbi gives his sermon. I’m built for praying with my hands and feet. Which is why, already in affection for his poetry and compassion, I fell in love with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for his practice. Asked why he marched from Selma to Montgomery arm in arm with Reverend Martin Luther King and others, Rabbi Heschel answered, "When I march in Selma, my feet are praying." Rabbi Heschel also said. "We are commanded to love our neighbor: this must mean that we can." That was a lesson I learned accidentally when our older son Ripton invited a baseball field of new teammates back to our home.

I began following some Christian writers and websites speaking of social justice. I wanted to walk across that narrow bridge with them. I bought a subscription to the Sojourners magazine (the paper one, hopelessly old school of me) and to their daily email blasts. I applied to the Sojourners conference on "Ending Poverty" for a place to participate. I thought I could contribute. Our five bigger boys were born into impoverished, disadvantaged homes. All eventually became single mother families. They were from public or other subsidized housing. Two of their dads had been murdered; one mom had died of drugs and AIDS; another dad had died of drugs and jail; a number of their brothers were drug dealers because that was the way they knew to put food on the table, buy clothes and pay the utility bills; some my son’s brothers had spent years in jail; before we met, some of my sons went hungry at the end of each month when their mother’s assistance checks had been spent; the family of one of my sons had plummeted into the homeless shelter system; on and more. But with the support, rigor and expectations of our home, each of the five boys we’d brought in had gone on to college, unheard of in their own families.

Sojourners had no room for me. I had applied late. I’m not a celebrity. Restaurants and hotels seem to keep space for the famous; I do understand that every seat might have been full.

I am one of those Bop Bags, a plastic blow up you punch over easily but it springs back, sand in its round bottom. The Sojourners‘ mission is to be "a progressive Christian commentary on faith, politics and culture. It seeks to build a movement of spirituality and social change." I fit. I am aware that I’m not Christian, but love (certainly, I was determined) means recognizing the inner sanctity in us all. What we were doing with the bigger boys in our family seemed a natural part of the discourse in the biblical call to social justice. Abraham, our common ancestor, rushed from beneath the shade of his tent at the oaks of Mamre to welcome three strangers into his home. I asked to meet with the head of Sojourners when I was to be in D.C. for a reading at Politics & Prose, a jewel of a bookstore. Sojourners‘ head was scheduled to be out of town. No one else there would meet with me. They were busy. I do know they have busy jobs. I reached out to a Christian speakers’ bureau in Nashville, Tennessee. I’d been following their premier writer, and the place seemed appropriate to the story I was telling. Their online "About Us" description reads: "[Agency] is a speaker’s bureau representing honest and relevant communicators from today’s culture. Among our presenters are men and women of today. Communicators dedicated to connecting message with the masses."

I intended honesty. I had fine ratings from my teaching days, good enough to think I’m a relevant communicator. I’m not yet too old (in my objective judgment) not to be from today’s culture. I am dedicated to connecting message with the masses, though "masses" seems a bit harsh. Their "About Us" doesn’t specifically say "Christian." I phoned the bureau’s president, he answered and I introduced myself. I told him the story of our extended family story, including the New York Jewish bits, and explained why I thought I fit his speakers’ bureau. He asked me to send him a copy of What Else But Home and to call back in two weeks if I hadn’t heard from him sooner. He didn’t call, so I did in two weeks. I couldn’t get him, so left a voice mail. He didn’t call my back. I waited a week and called again, left another voice mail and he didn’t call back. I waited another week and called, left another voice mail and he didn’t call back.

I received an email, unsolicited, from a woman coordinating "Jewish Week ‘Literary Summer’ events," in Manhattan. She and her coworkers set up a reading at Rodeph Sholom, a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, pairing me with Matthew Aaron Goodman, author of Hold Love Strong, for me a stirring novel. More than two hundred people came to our reading. Soon after, The Jewish Week ran an article about my book and our family. A while later, I had a phone conversation with a radio show producer, responding to outreach from one of the publicity people I’m working with. That show, hosted by a Catholic nun, addresses issues across faiths. The producer and I spoke for fifteen minutes. She told me, near the end, that the story of our family didn’t have enough of a "religious angle" for show’s listeners. I repeated my Matthew 25 Gospel. I spoke about repairing broken vessels of sacred light, though not quite in those words-tikkun olam. I spoke about Rabbi Heschel praying with his feet. She wished me luck. Soon after, Tablet Magazine wrote an article about my book and our family. A famous Christian writer, whom I deeply respect, said he’d interview me for his blog. His books are inspirational. He’s dedicated to mentoring. Our interview hasn’t happened. I understand he’s very busy. Jewcy.com (this very website) reached out and asked me to contribute a week of entries on social justice. This is my last of five pieces.

A well known Christian blogger said he’d do a Q&A with me. Then he said he was too busy. The Jewish Channel, a New York cable TV station, called my publisher. We’ve set a date for a taping later this week. The Jewish Book Council has supported What Else But Home, helping book me in JCCs and across the country. A Sojourners blogger has said she’ll do a Q&A with me. I hope this will happen.

In trying to make sense of the media and conference acceptances and rejections, the anthropologist in me sees a chasm between Jewish and Christian communities-one welcoming of, the other so far largely uninterested in my message. My inner-anthropologist also sees no right and wrong in either community’s acceptance or rejection. But since my writer-self wants to be wrapped with Christian communities in rapt dialogue about social-change-as-sacred, I do search for the schism. Part of the Christian-Jewish / rejection-acceptance experience I am trying to make sense of is certainly no more complex than understanding I "belong" to one group and not the other, to one culture and not the other.

The best answer I’ve found lies in Karen Armstrong’s understanding of the place of belief and practice in the Christian and Jewish traditions. These two strains of Western monotheism, Jews sojourning in a dominant Christian midst for the past two millennia, give dramatic varying place to each. In large part, we share the same words-the same

Biblical /Old Testament books and prophets. Yet Micah’s admonition of the importance and sufficiency of doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly will mean different things depending upon whether one sees the need to overlay that admonition with the acceptance of the divinity of Jesus. Or is unconcerned with such.

Armstrong explains the priority of belief in Christianity and practice is Judaism, and understanding the place of each in making sense of our history. Of her own theology, "I say that religion isn’t about believing things. It’s about what you do. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness." My theology is Armstrong’s. And I wonder, in my desire to embrace my Christian brothers and sisters in a dialogue of social justice inspired by our common religious background, what I can do to bridge a gap I sense and so much want not to exist?

In other words: I’m looking to embrace, and to be embraced. I’m open to the ways.

The post When a Jewish Author Reaches Out to the Christians appeared first on Jewcy.

An article in today’s New York Times gave me pause to consider its own sadness, then to consider how we treat far too many of our own children here.  According to the piece, single moms are apparently an anathema in South Korea. The article doesn’t even touch other parenting types such as childrearing lesbian and gay couples, straight or gay single dads, and more.

Chang Ji-young, 27, who gave birth to a boy last month, said: "My former boy-friends’s sister screamed at me over the phone demanding that I get an abortion.  His mother and sister said it was up to them to decide what to do with my baby because it was their family’s seed."

"My brother said: ‘How can you do this to our parents,’" said Ms. Choi, 27, a hairdresser in Seoul. "But when the adoption agency took my baby away, I felt as if I had thrown him into the trash.  I felt as if the earth had stopped turning.  I persuaded them to let me reclaim my baby after five days."

…said Lee Mee-kyong, a 33-year-old unwed mother.  "Once you become an unwed mom, you’re branded as immoral and a failure.  People treat you as if you had committed a crime.  You fall to the bottom rung of society."

Only about a quarter of South Koreans are willing to have a close relationship with an unwed mother as a coworker or neighbor, according to a recent survey by the government-financed Korean Women’s Development Institute.  "I was turned down eight times in job applications," Ms. Lee said. "Each time a company learned that I was an unwed mom, it accused me of dishonesty." 

My anthropologist self wonders:  What in South Korean society is so threatened by single parenting mothers that it wrecks agony upon its young women and their born and unborn children?  A partial answer could be that Confucius-based societies are profoundly paternalistic.  So a female-headed household is acephalous, to be feared.  It exists on the border between what is sacred (family, our own children having children), is not clearly outside that border (foreign society, perhaps?) and is therefore dirty, in need of washing away, being made to disappear;  Emile Durkheim & Mary Douglas, the sacred-profane dichotomy, Anthropology 101.

A few statistics of interest:  in 2007, 1.6% of South Korean births (nearly 8000) were from single mothers – compared to nearly 40% in the US.  South Korean statistics report that 96% of pregnant single mothers "choose" abortion, and of the 4% who do give birth, nearly 70% of these women place their babies for adoption.   A large percentage of babies placed for adoption are adopted abroad, 90% of these in the US.  All this in a country spending billions of dollars a year to reverse its declining birthrate.  What we do as a culture says far more about who we are than it does about what protects our survival or that of our environment.  Perhaps Confucian paternal hierarchy is threatened in South Korea, and hence the anathema of single parenting moms – despite the society’s focus on increasing birthrates, despite aspects of love and compassion.

But why do I fixate on South Korea?  I come back to my own family, my own sons of color.  An African anthropologist I read years ago, Asmmom Legesse in Gada: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society, wonders in his Afterward about the American propensity to jail the people we most want not to see.  He says we have jails for schools, jails for housing, jails for jails and more.  Raising our five "bigger boys," visiting their high schools, spending too much time in the legal system seeking to avert the tragedy of "jail jail" for one of our sons,  knowing the sequestered oppression of the housing they’d grown up in, witnessing the plight of their brothers encountering the job markets and judicial system – I wonder just what it is we as a culture are so deeply afraid of in virile African-American and Latino males?  There seems to be no threat if the once youthful and virile grow to middle age and more-though morbidity and mortality mitigate against far too many.  And no threat when they are truly young.  But in a society where nearly one third of all Black men spend some time in jail, filled with other statistics I’m out of time today to dig more for (but which you inherently know the boundaries of)-what are we so afraid of, and how can we get over that fear? Because millions are oppressed, which also makes no sense in a society that flourishes best if educated people produce and consume.  Out of time-that’s a start.  What am I, what are you, afraid of?

The post Why Are You And I Afraid Of My Sons? appeared first on Jewcy.

A couple years ago, the war we’re conducting in Iraq was far more in view than the war we’d "already won" in Afghanistan.  Now the two are switching place.  Administrations have changed, resources are being refocused.  Americans are more aware that we’ve actually been at war in Afghanistan for eight years. 

I’m not a policy expert.  I’m not much focused on international affairs.  I do think about responsibility, justice, compassion and the sweep of history.  The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan the day before Christmas, 1979.  And did poorly. The British earlier invaded twice, 1838 to 1842 and 1878 to 1880, neither time well. Genghis Khan came earlier from the north and Timur Lung from the east.  Neither conqueror truly prevailed.  Arab Muslims came earlier from the west – they at least have the enduring legacy of Islam.  Alexander the Great, cruising through Iran, ground to a three-year halt battling in Afghanistan.  That was a long time ago.

Juan and William, two of our five "bigger boys" and two of our seven sons, announced earlier that semester that they’d been contacted by a Navy recruiter, had met and thought his promises of military service pretty good.  They were each then attending the Borough of Manhattan Community College, BMCC.  They’d started a year earlier (together with Philippe, a third of our "bigger boys") at a community college Upstate, but missed home and returned.  And William’s girlfriend was pregnant-he wanted to be close to his expected daughter.  My wife and I tried to convince William that he and his girlfriend were too young (in all ways) to raise a child.  Then we tried to convince him to best provide for his daughter by remaining in college Upstate, more quickly earning a degree and a better living than he could as an unskilled high school graduate. 

But William and Juan returned home to New York. 

We badgered and convinced them the following autumn to enroll at BMCC , the third college for William, the second for Juan.  Nothing in starting again was smooth.  They lost courses.  But at least they were back in college, what we considered crucial because the average earnings for a college graduate are significantly higher than for someone without.  My wife and I had long planned that the way out of "the ghetto" (their term) and its oppression for our five "bigger boys," the kids we’d met on that baseball field, who’d moved into our home and become sons, was to gain a solid enough footing in America by earning a college degree.

William explained that the Navy would train him as a firefighter, he’d serve a few years then be honorably discharged and fully qualified to join New York’s fire department, a steady job for a dad.  He’d have extraordinary health benefits, as would his daughter.  Juan said he’d be trained as a guard.  The two young men would be stationed together-the "buddy system"-in Norfolk, Virginia, for the whole of their service, perhaps the Military’s marketing solution for boys too reticent to head off to Paradise Island alone. 

I told them my sons that they’d be sent to Iraq. They said the Navy didn’t send men to Iraq.  I searched "Navy Iraq" and showed them the top result:  the US Navy was sending more troops to Iraq.  They told me that Google and I were wrong.  William and Juan never told me, my wife or any of our other sons that they’d already enlisted.  The two disappeared the week after Thanksgiving. Neither responded to our calls or texts. William was supposed to go to the gym with Ripton, our oldest, and didn’t show up.

Each of their mothers, when I phoned, explained what had happened. William and Juan were in basic training in the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, in Illinois.  Their recruiter had reached them a few days after Thanksgiving to explain that to remain in the "buddy system" they had to agree to change their enlistment contracts, to be reassigned from fireman and guard to Navy Corpsmen. 

Staying together was crucial; two young men, nearly boys, one Dominican, the other Puerto Rican, both poorly educated, certainly not sophisticated, from hard backgrounds.  The recruiter didn’t explain what my father, a veteran of Korea, instantly understood:  Navy Corpsman are medics for the Marines.  "Ninety-nine percent of you are going to Iraq," my sons were told when they landed in Illinois. 

William and Juan didn’t want to die or be maimed there.   They resisted.  The Navy tried to break their resistance, and didn’t.  My sons eventually came home, shaken but ultimately fine.  Except that only now, years later, have they returned to BMCC. They are again taking remedial and introductory courses. They are twenty-three and twenty-four years old.  Their chances for earning Bachelor degrees are now enormously slim-though we don’t discuss this fact.  Their risks of recreating the lives their parents gave them are that much larger; which they would offer to their children.   Our military has conned chances from them.

I can’t speak for foreign policy.  I know that for nearly 2500 years, among the world’s greatest armies have fought in Afghanistan and hardly prevailed.  Our government has been sending soldiers there for almost a decade, killing and being killed, maiming and being maimed.  We are a democracy, yet have kept the social, cultural and moral costs of war far from wide discussion by putting so much of the burden on the young and not-so-young men compelled through National Guard contract, and on other young and vulnerable men, often of color and poor, channeled through recruiters. Some of these recruiters, I don’t know how many but I doubt few, are dishonest, as we experienced  with William and Juan.  And war is kept from public view also by employing private companies to supply and conduct it. 

A far more just way forward is to bring war into national focus through compulsory conscription of the young – either a universal national service or draft.  The Vietnam and Civil Wars saw draft riots, and thus widespread consideration of the ways of military engagement.  I don’t know of such resistance in the First, Second and Korean Wars. 

I do know that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are conducted by exploiting our most vulnerable, sending them to face and suffer death and disturbance. And for their loved ones to similarly suffer, often for their lifetimes.  Let the waging of war or not be an integral part of our national debate, closer to Athenian democracy than to continuing a tyranny too easily approached.

The post Are You Willing to Send Your Children to Die? appeared first on Jewcy.

I despised my mother’s Spanish rice. My father made it clear that’s what we could afford on Wednesday nights. My mom and dad worked together and grew us solidly into the middle class.  I got an education.  I married well and rich.  I made money.  I wrote a book.

I’ve wondered, what right do I have to live so well?  What I mean-when so many others right beside us don’t.  What right do you – at their expense?  That’s the point.

My son Morgan and I, we plan to have “father-son dinner” every Thursday.  He’s sixteen.  I’ve been away too long.  He says he’s lonely. Our house is empty.  I missed Yom Kippur at home, staying in Greensboro waiting for San Francisco – no one was there to insist Morgan go to shul.   I’m traveling now to bookstores, book fairs, Rotary Clubs, prisons, A Better Chance homes, any closet with at least another who’ll listen to me for half an hour or so and buy my book.  Or listen to me, act rapt and leave empty handed.  They’re okay, those people. They’re mostly old and remind me of Thoreau strolling around Walden, inspecting others’ farms.  I inscribe books: What Else But Home: Seven Boys and an American Journey Between the Projects and the Penthouse.  Come to one of my Book Readings, I won’t bore you… I’m an expert (because I’ve written a book – a feel-good story, a strong narrative arc), I’ve been doing this for two months.

At our dinner earlier tonight, a Monday make-up, Morgan said, “It’s not about the past, it’s about the future.”  He said, “It’s revolutionary.”  He meant our ability to make the world better, if we try.  Improve lives.  Morgan’s young.

Randy Newman sang, Cain slew Abel, Seth knew not why, for if the children of Israel were supposed to multiply, why must any of the children die?  So he asked the Lord, and the Lord said, “Man means nothing, he means less to me, than the lowliest cactus flower or the humblest yucca tree.” Emanuel Levinas argues that Cain wasn’t mocking G-d when he asked if he were his brother’s keeper, Abel buried in the ground.  Cain was instead discussing ontology, devoid of morality.  Yes, certainly! Morality resides, Levinas argues, in that we are YES all responsible: “All men [people] are responsible for one another, and I more than anyone else” (Pg. 107, Entre Nous).   Levinas yanks this asymmetry from Dostoevsky.  And… “I am in reality responsible for the other even when he or she commits crimes.  This is for me the essence of the Jewish conscience” (ibid.)  “Justice comes from love…  Love must always watch over justice… In Jewish theology (Levinas interjects that he isn’t explicitly guided by that theology, nor am I) G-d is the G-d of justice, but his principal attribute is mercy” (Pg. 108). And one last piece, because I sinned on Yom Kippur:  “The only absolute value is the human possibility to giving the other priority over oneself.  I don’t think there is a human group that can take exception to that ideal, even if it is declared an idea of holiness.  I am not saying that the human being is a saint, I’m saying that he or she is the one who has understood that holiness is indisputable.  This is the beginning of philosophy, this is the rational, the intelligible.  In saying that, it sounds as if we are getting away from reality. But we forget our relation to books-that is, to inspired language-which speaks of nothing else” (Pg. 109).

That’s not a Tweet, no disrespect.  It’s not a best selling book about a cute cat adopted in a library.  Or my doggie, Mr. Jenkins.  My nineteen-year-old Ripton could text the above in twenty or twenty-five seconds.  But read it.  Ripton, our oldest son, was born in New York in 1990, and Morgan, our youngest, in Grand Prairie Texas, in 1993.  We adopted each of them nearly at birth, converted them with brit and mikvah, and I have no idea where those paper certificates of Judaism are.  I hope my sons don’t grow older in a Jewish world where paper certificates matter.  But I’m not naïve.

In the summer of 1998, when he was nearly eight, Ripton walked us onto a blacktop baseball field in the small park across the street from our Lower East Side apartment.  He’d insisted we buy some baseballs and a bat, to be ready. He and I had brand new gloves, in case the boys in the sandlot game wouldn’t let him play.  Then he and I could toss the ball around instead.  That was my plan, a dad’s responsibility.

One of the captains (his team a player short) assigned our son to right field – the great emptiness of youth baseball (the grass of my Little League career).  The first game ended, boys gathered around home plate and the captains, one tall and Black, the other squat and Puerto Rican, both in their late teens, began picking new teams. Those two, the oldest, were the permanent captains.  What they said, the rest of that summer and the next, ruled the field’s skim coat of concrete and macadam to the surrounding chain link fence.  Baseball players and Polish-speaking indigents shared the space with skateboarders and half courts of basketballers  lining the far chain link.

My wife and I were the only adults watching the game, the only ones attached to children.  A half dozen men did keep place on the few benches bolted along the first and third base lines. They were Polish speaking, bloated, clutching brown paper bags narrowed around bottlenecks, passing these with blackened hands.  Leslie and I had never gotten close enough to them over the years, close enough to this place, to smell the urine baking up beside the benches, especially close to home plate.  Leslie and I sat there first, hoping for the premier view to watch our son bat when his time came. We ignored the urine as best we could but another scent bothered us, intermittent, dependent on the breeze, dog leavings we finally figured until I followed the green bellied flies landing on Leslie’s New York Times to a DayGlo swarm undulating on a brown mess beneath a bit of dirtied toilet paper.  We realized why none of the Polish speaking men were using the bench we were and moved farther towards first base, away from their latrine.

The captains worked from the older boys down to the younger. The squat captain finally pointed to Ripton, tall for his age.  “The White nigga,” he announced.

That is how we joined the Lower East Side, the diversity of our community, eight years after we moved here.  Yesterday I mentioned Rabbi Heschel’s thought about the difficulty of loving your neighbor when the poor and oppressed are hidden in ghettos (all the various ones we’ve invented).  Ripton invited his teammates home for video games and food after it got dark.  Ten or a dozen came.  That was our beginning of love.    I don’t mean the 1960s naivety – “free love.”  I mean responsibility for the other. Love without Eros.

The post Love Is Free: Thoughts on Raising Seven Adopted Sons appeared first on Jewcy.

I was in prison. Fifty men behind a too long series of steel doors, unbreakable windows, concrete corridors, guard stations, the immoral glare of florescent light.

The guys were all Latino and Black, a very few Whites, rainbowed like my seven sons. My wife and I raised two Puerto Rican, two Dominican, one Black and two White boys. Our lighter brown skinned kids are Catholic, our dark brown one is Protestant and our light skinned sons are Jews, like us. Only the last two are "really" ours, sons by law to my wife and I. What does "real" mean, however, when it comes to family? The other five, the "bigger boys" as we still call them though they’re now twenty-three and twenty-four years old, came to us from need. From the mystery and grace of G-d in the swing of a young boy’s bat towards a baseball on a blacktop field. I don’t believe in G-d, but want to in a world of sanctity.

The guards were enormous. They were mostly people of color. I’d been brought by two City Youth Now couselors, and we were with three or four English teachers, all colorless like me -"White niggas," my sons call us. I’d been invited as a "guest author" for two classes in Juvenile Hall in San Francisco, but it was basically jail. The boys had been incarcerated for an average of two, perhaps two and a half years. As adults, statistics say 40% will end up in jail again and 60% will be ongoingly "dependent on [the] system" (from City Youth Now, the people who brought me to "juvie hall"), including homeless, on assistance and etc. Nearly 50% will never finish high school and fewer than 3% will go on to a 4-year college.

Those statistics are a large part of the story of our American underclass. People of privilege don’t talk much about our underclass. It’s stuck behind the curtain of our optimism and the guiding myth of opportunity. We agree, us privileged (P.S.: you almost certainly fit in), not to pull back the curtain and reveal the unswept backstage. But I’m supposed to let the narrative speak for itself.

In prison, I spoke with twenty-five boys per group. They wore various issued hues of green tees and pull-up pants, what could be sweats or surgical scrubs. I’m there ostensibly talking about my new book, What Else But Home: Seven Boys and an American Journey Between the Projects and the Penthouse. The City Youth Now counselors know that having a (deeply involved) man in a boy’s life, whether it’s a father (most all of these boys are from fatherless homes), a sports coach, or a true mentor, can make all the difference. I write MENTOR on the white board during each class. I ask two questions: "Who will love you? Who will care about you?" They’re the same question. A teacher fetches a pencil and I pass around my notebook, asking the boys to write answers. It’s not fair of me. It’s gut wrenching. I want to push, for them and me to get as close as we can in little time to what might save lives. To what I’m convinced through my eleven years now of being the father of underprivileged boys who didn’t have fathers and lived in the great sucking vacuum of that absence, is a matter of life and death. Boys in danger cannot think of themselves as alone, or they come to rely on peers/gang brothers. They need a mentor, a coach, a dad.

A guard makes sure the short stub of pencil is in his hands when the notebook comes to me. You know why.

One young man, Dante, wrote: "When it all falls down at the end of the day, alone in my room sitting in a corner thinking with all the lights off, I will love me. I will care about me the most! More than any man or any woman ever will." I’d spoken with Dante before I read his note. He’s not small, but slight. He’s eloquent. He told me he’d been in for two months. His teachers, later, told me he’d been in for two years. I can see him in his cell at night, a door he can’t open. He doesn’t know the way through, anyway.

That’s what I’m going to write about this week. Justice and compassion, social responsibility. Cain and Abel, Emmanuel Levinas the the extended family of seven boys we’ve raised. And some of their brothers, whom I haven’t figured out how to touch. And as my son Kindu says, it’s too hard out there on the grind. Can we really do that to kids? I’ve always been intrigued with Rabbi Heschel; how can we love our neighbor when we shut her and him up in a ghetto? I’ll have a latte, please.

The post My Day as a White Guy in Prison appeared first on Jewcy.