It shocks even me to write this, so I imagine this is news to any of my readers.
He is not just my friend - more like an adoptive big brother. He and his wife took me in when I was lost and lonely. They may not have realized that's what they did, but that's how I remember it.
I arrived in New Jersey for grad school attached to someone. And suddenly that whole situation changed and with it, my living arrangements, my feelings about relocating from one of the most beautiful places I'd ever been, to one of the meanest. And about three weeks after that I was diagnosed with a very serious and complicated illness. So, then not only alone, but scared and alone and pretty miserably unhealthy.
Some months later a series of weird coincidences brought me into a karate school of all places. And within a week I knew I was hooked. I had zero natural ability for the sport but I was fascinated and determined. I was also sick and hoping to do what I could do to feel better. So I kept going. As the months went by I had treatments and medical procedures, I had good days and bad days, I had care packages from my best friend from college, and homework, and tests, both academic and medical, but I also had karate classes, growing confidence, and a better handle on what it felt like to feel powerful and safe as I walked through my new world. (Which, for me, as a young woman who had experienced some violence, was a pretty significant change in my outlook and sense of security.)
The routine I settled into was to go to class on Monday and Wednesday, and so I would pack my lunch and dinner, show up for classes, cross the river to head to the lab on the north side, do some research, and then head to the karate school . . . because it was time consuming to cross back and forth over the bridge. So I'd go to the dojo about an hour early, change, and ask permission to microwave my dinner. I'd sit and watch the pre-teens and teens work out, and think about what it would take for me to get to that level of technique. It only took about a week of this before a tiny little brown baby girl (she was almost 3, but talked like a 6 year old, and was small enough to look like she was still entering toddler-hood) walked directly up to me and said, clear as a bell, "That smells good. Can I have some?" I asked her mother, and discovered her mother was my Sensei's wife, and we all agreed roasted veggies or rice and beans were good food. That's how S brought me into this family. Sharing dinner with S became them wanting to share lunch with me . . . on Shabat. And that became babysitting. Babysitting became them thinking, "If we trust her with our kids, we can probably trust her with other people's kids. And that became them expanding the Kinder Karate program and adding me as a new instructor.
Over time, I stopped just working for them, and started working with them, and, additionally, being part of the family. I would help with things as disparate as bathing kids, moving the dojo, teaching karate, writing lesson plans, covering birthday parties, setting the table for Shabat, making salad, and saying prayers with the daughters and mothers. After a couple of years, it actually became an expectation that I would bring fruit to Shabat and to other holidays, and for certain holidays it was routine for me to help out with the preparation of certain dishes. I spent almost every Friday night at the Shabat table saying prayers, eating dinner, drinking shots, discussing (read: questioning. Asking questions is not at all considered rude or disrespectful to belief in the Jewish belief system. In fact, it's considered a responsibility of that faith) Torah, and telling tales of the karate school that week, teasing and being teased for four straight years.
Family. Plain and simple.
Ask yourself this - if someone in your family went to jail, would they still be part of your family? Of course, the answer is yes. At least if you're me, it is.
When my friend was first accused of this infraction, I actually never even wasted time asking if he did it, or anything like it. I knew everyone involved, knew the politics, and knew my friend's heart. There is just. no. way.
But, can I say this? Even if he had done it, he's still my family. And his family is still my family. I still love him, and them. And so even if we, the extended family and loved ones of my friend, really thought he did this, I think we would still be struggling with the same question: how could this happen to the generous, funny, sometimes-difficult-but-also-eye-opening person we loved and what can we do to be part of the good person and worthwhile objectives we knew him for?
Having indulged me to say the above, I will also admit to you that it's much, much easier for me to arrive at that place because of my certainty that he was not involved in this crime.
So, I ask myself a lot of tough questions when I think about him and my family :
- What do people say about him to his kids?
- What do his kids know or understand?
- What must it take for his wife to get up every day and keep going, knowing that everything is, and always be different, knowing that it's all on her to keep her family safe and healthy at the moment.
- Why does accusation equal guilt and responsibility in the court of public opinion?
- As someone who believe victims of violating crimes should speak up and be heard, and not treated EVER as having been at fault for what happened to them, what kind of stance can I take on the fact that sometimes people do lie about this and have other goals beyond telling the truth
- What does it mean to plead guilty to a crime you didn't commit? What did it take for him to stand up in court and agree to that?
Some of this is why I've been working on this post since December 14th (for reference sake . . . t-minus one week before losing my job). That was the last time I spoke to him on the phone, knowing he had already plead guilty, and knowing he would be facing sentencing and leaving his family in two days. His family threw a Chanukah party, and family and friends came from all over to celebrate, and have a moment to love and support my friend and his family.
Another good friend had tipped me off, and I was able to call and talk to my friends for about an hour before the party got too loud, too busy, too much. And we did what we do best - we talked deep.
Of course, there are some obvious lessons to this. For one, however angsty I am feeling about unemployment, and the prospect of re-creating my life from the ground up, things could be worse. That's the gimme. That's not a reach as something to keep in mind.
The other thing this has caused me to dwell on is what justice means. My dear friend being faced with losing his home, business, and life as he knows it, for a possibly longer jail sentence vs. saying he did something he didn't do and accepting 1-3 years inside, isn't what I thought of as just. But in the same way that someone being acquitted doesn't mean their innocent, my friend pleading guilty doesn't mean he is. What I said to him when we talked that night was, "Hashem (God) knows the truth. And your real friends do too."
To a lot of us, justice is about acknowledging, or righting a wrong, or the administering of a punishment or reward in order to partially give back something which was taken. But justice is also defined as morality, or adherence to a moral code, just conduct, or rightfulness or lawfulness. It's lawful that he's in jail, in that the law provided for him to plead guilty, and he did. But it's not right. It's not moral, to me, that those were the choices he faced. But, it was a moral choice for him to not spend years putting his family through this.
What I've thought a lot about is that our court system isn't really about justice so much as it is about applying laws(often imperfectly). In general, when things get taken into a court room or trial, things have already failed deeply enough that they can't really be recovered. A really smart lawyer once shared with me, "In my experience, people are rarely satisfied with a legal resolution to their problems." Honestly, it was really easy for me to understand that from the complainants perspective before, but I also now know that it applies to defendants. It's all so easy for us to hear about someone hauled into the police station for hurting someone, or accused in court of something really violating, and assume that if they were accused they did it. But hey, one out of every nine times we sentence someone to die in this country WE'RE WRONG. We're so wrong, DNA proves that we're wrong. (I like what this speaker says. If airline pilots were wrong this often, if pharmaceuticals were distributed in error 10% of the time - we would never accept it as a society. But we accept it in our legal system. Crazypants) If our justice system has this much injustice built into it in crimes where the burden of proof is so much higher not just for trial, but for sentencing, then how often are we wrong for "lesser" crimes?
And what do those errors mean for real people? For my friend it means 1-3 years of not being there for his wife and kids. Of not earning money. Of not voting or being a citizen. And it means a lifetime of people assuming that if he was accused, he must be guilty, and worse, with an irrefutable criminal and prison record following him to help people to that conclusion.
But I've also spent some time thinking about something he and I started to talk about that Chanukah night. He said, "There are people that are mirrors for us. and I just want to stay grateful for the people who have held up that mirror for me and kept me honest, kept me walking towards what's good in me. And there are potholes. They can slow us down, but they only stop us if we let them. I just need to remember that every day in there. I'm still me. And I appreciate so much you saying that my real people know the true truth. I hate the idea that people think of me as a scum bag. And I need to remember that I get to choose whose opinions I care about. I get to choose my mirrors, if not my potholes."
Of course, he and I haven't spoken since then. I hope in 12-36 months to sit at his Shabat table, drink some shots, and talk about this topic with a lot of heart, and attention, live. And in the meantime, we write. Nearly every week. and this is often the theme. I mean, he also tells me about his friends on the inside, how inmates make wall hooks for pictures, and trading for apple peels or playing basketball. But we also talk a lot about his faith, about his attitude, about his understanding of what this means to him. In his first letter he said, "It's not that I'm happy to be in prison, it's that I'm choosing to be happy while I'm in prison."
More recently, he reminded me that not everything is good, but that we can always choose to get good out of it, to work the bad together into a good. It's a little humbling to be sitting on my comfortable couch, with all the wall hooks I need, being reminded this by my friend in jail. Mostly, I'm proud of him and hope that his heart can stay this strong, and positive.
I need to believe that the bad can be worked for our good. If he can do it, there is certainly hope for me too.
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