Philadelphia, USA - After 31 years in the pulpit, after postings from the Mexican border to a New England college town, Rabbi Jonathan Gerard retired in 2007 with the notion of spending more time on his private practice as a family therapist. Then, shortly before Rosh Hashana last fall, a colleague in the Reform movement asked him if he would mind taking on a part-time job with a small congregation outside Philadelphia.
Somewhat reluctantly, Rabbi Gerard agreed. His new flock numbered only eight, and in certain ways was quite ordinary. The members included a paralegal and a furniture-store owner; only a couple bothered to keep kosher; and the rank and file complained that the congregational president was too bossy.
Still, Rabbi Gerard, 62, arrived for that first Rosh Hashana service with a sermon about the akedah, Abraham’s binding of Isaac, a central text in the liturgy, and a chocolate cake baked by his wife, Pearl. It turned out that she had been in the same high school homeroom in Philadelphia as the brother of one of the congregants.
Rabbi Gerard also brought some Honeycrisp apples, symbolizing the hope for a sweet new year. The fruit attracted some quizzical glances, the rabbi noticed. Then he realized why. The Honeycrisp hybrid has been widely sold only in the past decade or so, and during that time many of Rabbi Gerard’s worshippers have been in prison.
Indeed, his entire congregation consisted of inmates at the State Correctional Institution in Graterford, the largest maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania. Whatever prosaic jobs they once held, what put them in Graterford was what the law calls crime and religion calls sin: murder, rape, assault. Four of the eight are serving life sentences.
Even so, the congregation has its own chapel with Torah scrolls, prayer books and memorial plaques. It is officially recognized by the Reform movement (as is a congregation at a federal prison in Minersville, Pa.) and has been functioning since it was founded in 1924 in Graterford’s predecessor institution, the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.
The sanctuary at Eastern State has recently been restored and certified as a National Historical Landmark. For Rabbi Gerard and his congregation in Graterford, however, religious observance is very much something in the present.
And at no other time of year in the Jewish calendar does the role of a Jewish prison chaplain seem more essential. The period from Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur is known as the Ten Days of Repentance.
Tradition and theology call on all Jews, of course, to engage in the soul-searching called heshbon ha-nefesh in Hebrew, and to make amends with repentance (or teshuva), prayer and charity. Yet this particular season of reflection and penitence comes after a banner year of proven or alleged misdeeds by Jews, from Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme to the violations of labor laws at the Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa to the arrest of several New Jersey rabbis in a scandal involving political bribery and trafficking in human organs.
If Rabbi Gerard’s experience at Graterford sheds any light on how the convicted and incarcerated encounter the High Holy Days, it is light that strikes in some unexpected ways. (Officials at Graterford would not permit interviews with individual prisoners or the release of their names.)
Most of the Jewish inmates have come to feel remorse about their crimes, Rabbi Gerard said. One or two continue to profess their innocence. All wrestle with a mixture of remorse and defensiveness.
“Their attitude is, they did a terrible thing — the ones who admit it — and they have to pay for it,” the rabbi said. “And they think they’re paying for it too much. They all know people who did worse things and got lighter sentences. So they don’t have a sense of how to do teshuva. They think they’re doing teshuva already.”
In different ways, Rabbi Gerard has tried to pierce the armor. In his sermon on Abraham last year, he described the patriarch as a kind of prisoner, the captive of a primitive God who demands human sacrifice. What Abraham discovered was that his God, a different kind of God, would never require such a thing.
The homily was a lesson, in a sense, about the Jewish precept that God gives humans free will. Yet in the discussion after the sermon, one of the inmates argued that Abraham had “passed the test” of piety by being obedient enough to nearly slaughter his child. Nobody disagreed.
“They’re not as liberal as I am,” Rabbi Gerard said recently, recalling the exchange.
In the months leading to this Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, Rabbi Gerard has often talked about giving charity, or tzedakah, and about the Jewish injunction to engage in tikkun olam, or healing the world. The prisoners, instead of being bitterly fixated on their own imprisonment, needed to help others.
So first the members floated a grandiose idea: raising enough money to build halfway houses for Jewish parolees. Rabbi Gerard guided them to something more realistic. The men are now collecting used prayer books from Reform temples so they can be sent to Jewish inmates throughout Pennsylvania.
What Rabbi Gerard has learned, meanwhile, is that when every day is a day of repentance, Rosh Hashana can mean something altogether different.
“For them, who have a thoughtfulness about teshuva every time they’re locked into their cells, the holidays are an escape,” he said. “When they come to the synagogue, they’re not in a prison. They’re in a sanctuary. They’re doing the same things Jews are doing all over the world.”