רפורמה בבתי הסוהר

00:02 This is our English year. We're back, and we are once again from letters fifty years ago. We're looking at a letter that is almost exactly fifty years ago. Chaf year, Tav Shin Lamed Gimel. It's up on the screen. The letter is Yud Tav Shin Ayin Vav. And, uh, we're going to talk about the Rebbe's liberal agenda. That is exactly the way that I would like to frame this. We don't have a lot of, uh, liberal causes that, uh, that you see the Rebbeim of Chabad get behind so strongly. The fact is that liberal and conservative are not really things that touch Yiddishkeit at all. We simply have Emes, and sometimes Emes happens to be Democratic, and sometimes Emes is Republican. And more often than anything else, Emes is neither, which has at least been my personal experience with politics. However, uh, here we have a, uh, what a lot of people would consider a very liberal way of looking at criminal justice and looking at criminal justice reform, and it is one of the Rebbe's, um... How do I say this? One of the Rebbe's favorite ideas, in that the Rebbe year after year after year mentions that he wants to see prisons handled differently in America. In the letter we have in front of us, he discusses how he'd like prisons to be handled in Eretz Yisrael. The Rebbe wants us to change how we do prison, whether we do prison at all. So that's what we're gonna discuss today. We're gonna look at

01:05 a letter from the Rebbe where he imagines what the ideal prison would look like, and then we're gonna look at a sikha together where he lays out the Torah's view about prison, about criminal justice, about jails, and, uh, what the Rebbe wants us to do. And finally, we're gonna talk a little bit about whether it actually happened. I have good news for you, a spoiler. I'm not good at keeping secrets. This is one of those rare cases where the Rebbe called for something and people actually did something about it, and it worked. A lot of times, the Rebbe at Farbrengens asks for things. We see the letters, we see the Farbrengens together, and we all go, " Anybody know if this ever happened? Maybe in a small way?" Uh, this is one of the times where the Rebbe called for something and it really did happen in a very big way, and actually only recently. So that's what we're gonna discuss today. Let's start with the letter. Letter we have here is to-- I don't really know who this is. Uh, this is Amar Avrami. That's-- That, that abbreviation, Samech Gimel Daled, if you look at the bottom is Sgan Gundar. I went and looked up what that was. In Eretz Yisrael, that's, uh, even today in Medinat Yisrael, that is the, um, designation for the person who's, like, second-in-command at a prison. So he's some kind of a warden, some kind of a prison warden. He's a menahil, that's the warden, of Machaneh Maaseiu.

02:05 Ma-Ma-Ma-Maaseio? Maaseio, I think. Maaseiu. Yeah, Maaseiu Prison. So it's the Maaseiu Prison. I didn't know this, but Maaseiu Prison is actually, I believe even today, the largest prison in Eretz Yisrael. I had no idea. I went-- I-- They have a Wikipedia page, so I checked their Wikipedia page. I also discovered on their Wikipedia page that this prison is named after Maaseiu who was in Tanakh, in Yermiyahu, in Yermiyahu thirty-five four. This-- People don't know Yermiyahu. I don't know Yermiyahu that well either, but when I was in high school, they had a, uh, in Mesivta, the, uh, the Rosh Yeshiva taught us Yermiyahu for some reason. It was his favorite thing. So of all the books of Tanakh, I randomly know Yermiyahu a little better than the other ones. In Yermiyahu, one of the prophecies God gives him is, uh, Hashem tells Yermiyahu, "Go to a certain family and tell them you're gonna have a wine date with them. Tell-- Bring a whole lot of wine. We're all gonna have wine together." So Yermiyahu brings them wine, unsuspectingly brings them wine and says, "I have a command from God to drink wine with you." And they said, "We're not doing it. We don't drink wine. Don't, don't you know our family? We were told generations ago that we're not gonna drink wine. We're not gonna touch this stuff, and, uh, we've listened to our ancestors for generations. We don't drink wine." Yermiyahu went back to God and said, "What was that all about?" And God said,

03:06 "Now tell the people, 'See? If they're willing to listen to their ancestors, the Jews should be willing to listen to me.'" Classic prophecy twist. Anyway, in that story, when they go to the location, the location given is Mim'al Lishkas Maaseiu Ben Shulam Shem Rasah, that the person who was in charge of the gates there, who was the gatekeeper, the guard of the gates in the time of Yermiyahu, was named Maaseiu. They actually named a prison after him. They named the prison after the guy who was the guard of the gates in the times of Yermiyahu. Why am I telling you this? Just because it's interesting. Okay, looking at the letter. Shalom Uvracha, the Rebbe says, "Nene ze kav mechtav haideha Rav Reines Shechia m'tzirei haKodesh Chabad." He says, "I was very happy to receive a letter from Tzirei HaKodesh Chabad." "Bekeshe l'simchas Purim Machaneh Maaseiu," because you had a Purim celebration in the Mach- in, in the Maaseiu Prison. "Ve'ita slicha shelene ze kedem lachem." The Rebbe says, "I'm sorry I haven't responded to your letter before now." "Eikev hatirtz har-ha-ha-har-harabois. Hatirtz harabois." The Rebbe says he's been very busy. "Veyodatin." This is the part that is, uh, relevant to us. "Veyodatin shehabayis shebashka-shebashkacha eliena marah mena habayis," that this, this prison, this house, that "bashkacha eliena, bashkacha pratza," you became the warden of-- Let's just pause here for a minute to reflect on the fact that the Rebbe's talking to a prison warden and telling him, "Bashkacha eliena," that God decided you'd be in

04:17 charge of a group of prisoners. Just I don't think most wardens think that way. "Ve'afech lebayis hazeh yakipshutei." The Rebbe says, "I hope it should be God's will that this prison should turn from a prison, kipshutei, lebayis Sahar, into a house of the moon." "Sihara yareach shetakdir lehair ala'aretz." That this should not be a prison that holds people and locks them away from society, but it should be a prison that allows them to reflect light onto society. "Shetakdir lehair ala'aretz," that your prison should become a lighthouse. Once again, not the way people think about prisons. "Heinem, shekal nimchnas lebayis-lebayis bev'eizim atzuv shi-shichia." Whenever anybody enters your prison for whatever reason or whatever situation they were in when they entered, "yahtzem mateichei bematzuv shehareach lemuluah lehair ala'aretz." I hope that they leave in a way that they are like a moon that is a full moon that is ready to shine onto the land. The Rebbe wants to see people come out the other end of prison reformed. "Aideh, heyezeh dugma chaya lechaim haru'im lishmam bachlah-bachlah," that they should be a "dugma chaya," they should end up being good examples for what a proper life should be. Lish-- And, and I don't, I don't, I don't know what he's referring to when he says, "Haru'im lishmam bachlah." I guess worthy of their names. I don't think it's worthy of the name of life. I think it's worthy of the names of the prisoners. I'm not sure. "Lechaim be'arteinu kedeshim if not," but certainly they should live

05:22 lives that are worthy of the life in Eretz Yisrael specifically, 'cause again, this is an Israeli prison. "Eretz asher tamid hashem einei hashem lekacha bamadei sheshana arach ad hasheshana." The land that God's always looking at. "Hareh ze talib ikar betech-niteot-betech-betech-niteot hamatimot," with proper organization. "Ve'afen al halah sama-sama- Machaneh bechulum." The, the, uh, effect of this prison, that it should have a, uh, that it should change people and make them better and make them go on to worthy lives is, the Rebbe says, mainly on the prison hanhalah. It's on you guys to make sure that you're doing things properly and setting things up so that they succeed once they leave. "Vezichru s'dam mesayat-mes-" I don't know how to pronounce. Mesayet? Anyway, this should help them. This should help all of you with covenant and success in all of these things, these things. So what do we have from the letter? We have from the letter that the Rebbe wants a prison to not just be a place that locks people up, but a place that changes people, makes them better. And the Rebbe has a very optimistic view of prison. He says anybody in charge of a prison is there that it should be their job to make sure that the prison is a place that turns from into , a house of the moon that, um, le-- has prisoners leaving. Maybe they come in as a small crescent moon or as a, as a new moon. By the time they leave, they're a full moon

06:31 ready to shine their light in the entire world and make the world a better place. The Rebbe sees a prison as a stepping stone to a better life, not as a place where we lock up the bad guys. This is the Rebbe's shitah all over the place. Uh, the Rebbe spoke about prison reform a lot. There are a bunch of sichas in Lamed Vav about it, are good letters from Lamed Gimel. So I don't know of any time that the Rebbe spoke publicly between this letter and Lamed Vav about it, but we have several sichas in Lamed Vav where the Rebbe gets into it. I don't know exactly why that year was an exciting year for the Rebbe about prison reform, but he talks about it like three or four times in that year. In nineteen eighty-one, the Rebbe again mentions in the sicha, uh, prisons, but this time he doesn't talk about prison reform, about turning, turning prisons into a place that make people better, not just a place to lock people up. In that sicha, he talks about the fact that yidden by nineteen eighty-one, the Chabad movement was very into shlichus. In the '80s was when you saw a big boom of people going out on shlichus. The Rebbe says in nineteen eighty-one, everybody's very excited about going out on shlichus and helping yidden who are desirable, yidden who people like, but no one wants to touch the prisons. No one wants to help out with the prisons. Shalom Lipsker is at

07:27 this farbrengen. That's the Shalom Lipsker in Ba- in Bal Harbour, in Bal Harbour. Um, he is at this farbrengen, and he says, "We've gotta change something." He founds the Aleph Institute, which I think many of us are familiar with. The Aleph Institute nowadays involved not just in prisons and not just in criminal justice reform, but also in like chaplaincies for the military. They do everything now. But he founded that in response to the Rebbe's sicha in nineteen eighty-one, uh, to promote the Rebbe's vision for at first just taking care of prisoners. And initially, what they were doing was they were just making sure prisoners had access to Yiddishkeit. But over time, he started introducing into the Aleph Institute the Rebbe's vision for making prisons a place that doesn't just lock people up, but makes them better. In nineteen eighty-five, Lipsker got permission from the Bureau of Prisons to take a group of twenty screened prisoners from twelve federal facilities for a mentorship program outside of prison. So he takes these twenty prisoners who've been pre-screened. I guess they're non-violent, or at least they're not afraid they're gonna run away. I don't know how they screened them. They took these twenty prisoners to New York, and they arranged for the Rebbe-- Rabbi Lipsker arranged for them attend a farbrengen Parshas Nasso nineteen eighty-five. Um, the people here are old enough that some of us might remember it. Does anybody here remember a farbrengen from nineteen eighty-five? You don't, you, you don't have to out yourself as

08:30 being that. You don't have to out- I was kinda born that year. Okay. I'm saying look, eighty-eighty-five is now m- very much in our territory, right? Okay- It was, it was the year of my bar mitzvah, but I don't, uh, my bar mitzvah was in eighty-five, but I don't remember the farbrengens. Okay. So this was farbrengen Parshas Nasso, uh, in nineteen eighty-five, and they had these twenty prisoners at the farbrengen. Rabbi Lipsker reserved a table for them 'cause he thought it was gonna get pretty crowded. At one thirty, just before the farbrengen was about to start, the Rebbe sent a message to Rabbi Lipsker b-by way of the maskiras, saying that the group should not sit together at the table because people are going to see a bunch of non-Lubavitchers walk into the farbrengen, sit at a table together. Everyone's gonna ask where are they from, and everybody's gonna figure out they're prisoners, and they'll be embarrassed. So he asked Rabbi Lipsker to spread them out around the entire room. So we have here twenty federal prisoners spread out around the room at the farbrengen at Parshas Nasso in nineteen eighty-five in Mem Hey. The reason why I'm telling you this is that at that farbrengen, the Rebbe very directly talked about prison reform. At the farbrengen where the prisoners are sitting there. That's the one in front of us right now. We have a sefer- Oh ...in front of us. I cut it, so we're only gonna look at these two pages. It's not

09:28 terribly long. It is terribly interesting. Where the Rebbe talks to the prisoners. If you look at footnote one twenty-six, uh, down here, footnote one twenty-six, he says, "At this farbrengen, there was a group of prisoners who had just been given off for Shabbos." So the Rebbe's talking very directly to the prisoners and of course to us as well. the Rebbe says. There's something that is connected to everything a person sees, they have to assume is a that I have to act a certain way based on what I see 'cause I see everything . So I wanna talk about prisoners. So what's the Rebbe saying? I look around the room, I see prisoners, so let's talk about prisoners. okay. the entire idea of having prison as a way of a punishment the Rebbe says. There's no such thing in the Torah of punishing people by locking them up. we have in the Torah a whole bunch of punishments. people get punished financially. They get punished by being smacked around by a whip. we kill people. but we never put people in prison. The Rebbe then has two paragraphs here we're gonna skim right over where he says there are a couple places in the Torah that mention prison, but they're not relevant to us. For example, Jo- Yosef was put in prison. But he says, I look at the bottom of the, the, the paragraph, he was put in prison in Egypt. That's the way Egyptians act. It's not the way Jews act. Then we also

10:47 have two cases in the Torah where someone was put in mishmar, the Kalba and the Mekesh are both put in mishmar. But as the Rebbe says, that was only temporary 'cause we were trying to figure out the . We had to figure out what to do with them, but they weren't supposed to stay there for any period of time. We just had to ask, "What do you do with this aveira?" Also, we have an ave-- we have a punishment that is kipa, where you put people into a confinement for a period of time, and we fill their belly with barley and water, and they end up sort of exploding. And, uh, the Rebbe says, the point there isn't to put them in prison. It's the beginning of a different punishment. But there is no concept in Torah of putting people in prison. there is no such thing in the Torah as, as getting punished by going to jail. And the Rebbe explains why. the point of a person who's on this earth is every person is created to serve Hashem. to make a dwelling place for God in this world. there's no point in putting a person behind a lock. the Rebbe says the whole point of being here is to do our job in serving Hashem, and locking a person up is . The reason why the Torah doesn't have any concept of prison is because this doesn't allow a person to fulfill their purpose in this world. the Rebbe says when it comes

12:02 to the other nations, when it comes to other nations, the simplest thing in the world is to lock people up. Ask anybody who's not Jewish, the most obvious punishment is lock them behind bars. uh, even in, in Mitzrayim when Yosef was put in prison, but even earlier, even earlier than that, certainly since Mitzrayim, it has only become more popular. even, even even nowadays. even when it comes to the nations of the world, the Rebbe says they're beginning to notice that this doesn't work. the awakened nations, the progressive nations. nations that pride themselves in running their countries with tzedakah and yeshua, the goyish nations. There has been a generally good change, the Rebbe says, in most of the ‹foreign›, they've changed how prisons are done. There's been prison reform. The point of prison is no longer in a lot of these enlightened nations just to make somebody suffer. It's meant to have a point. The main point is first of all, to prevent people from hurting others, to, uh-- What, what's the language I'm looking for in English? There's a word for this in English. Um, . Whatever. We lock people up so that they don't hurt other people. I can't think of the word right now. But in addition to that, more than that, they're giving people the opportunity to use their time correctly when they're in prison, to help reform people, to help rehabilitate people so that they can be released into society and be productive again. They can have a new life a-after

13:29 they leave the . The Rebbe says in this paragraph, there are some nations that have not become so progressive, but the Rebbe says you'll find in these nations they're pretty nasty to people who aren't in prison too. So the, the, the nations that are not progressive about prisons can be pretty rotten to everybody, not just their prisoners. When I'm talking anyway, the Rebbe says about medinas like America that are based on tzedek and yesha, based on justice and uprightness, they're trying to decrease the suffering of people who are prisoners and more than anything else, the most important thing, trying to make them better, prison reform and the, I guess, criminal reform. Making people able to, when they leave prison, turn over a new leaf, um, that's what we're talking about here. And the Rebbe says it's a very good thing. I'm just moving along 'cause I don't wanna get stuck in Hasichah the whole time. This is something the Rebbe was, of course, very passionate about, that, uh, in addition to those things that we talked about, that they're able to improve their lives in prison in these progressive countries, they're also able to take part in religion in prison. What is that? I, I wonder if that's supposed to be a ches. I think it might be a-- I think there might be a, a misprint there. Okay. In any case. Similarly, prisoners are occasionally allowed to leave the prison, as in the case when the Rebbe has prisoners in front of him who've

15:00 been allowed to leave. Anyway, the Rebbe says, "I'm very happy with this idea of prison reform. I'm very happy with the idea of prisoners getting the opportunity to, uh, to enrich themselves in prison, to enrich their religious life, and also their normal life outside of religion, in prison to become better." And then the Rebbe has a for everybody saying that we too are in prison. The Rebbe says, what is pri-- what is galus anyway? It's like being put in prison. The fact that we're not able to do the mitzvahs that have to do with the Beis Hamikdash since we're in galus, this is like somebody trapped in prison. A person in prison isn't able to do what they want, and they're not able to fulfill their role. We're in galus, so we're unable to do what we, we want and we're unable to fulfill some of our roles, some of the mitzvahs that we're trying to do. In addition to the fact that we've been taken away from our home in Eretz Yisrael and Yerushalayim, uh, so in addition to the fact that we have been taken away from our home, and that's why we're in galus, we also are unable to do the things that fulfill our purpose, and that's very similar to someone in prison who's taken far away from their home and is unable to fulfill their purpose. the Rebbe says, "Just like I would like prisons to exist in order to reform people and reform societies, I would like galus to

16:13 exist for that reason too." Why are we in galus? Why has God put us in a spiritual prison? So that we can go even higher. Even when we're in galus, our prison. What we should do is exactly what good prisoners do in prison, right? You get off early for good behavior, and you, uh, and you spend time trying to get-- you spend time trying to learn more. You spend time trying to learn job skills to improve yourself. The Rebbe wants us, while we're in our galus prison, to do the same thing that he wants people in regular prisons to be able to do, enrich themselves so that when they do finally leave prison and when we finally leave galus, we'll find ourselves significantly better than the way that we came in. There's a couple sichas that go but this is probably the core sicha where the Rebbe lays out exactly what he would like to see prisons do and what he considers, what he considers good for prisons. Now, the question that I wanna end on is whether this actually happened. I know I hinted at the beginning that in a, in a way, it kind of did. So first of all, the Rebbe in the sicha is already talking about the fact that, that America is getting better at this, and he's encouraging it. Uh, and the Rebbe wants to see it happen even more. And, uh, throughout the years, Rabbi Lipskier got many from the Rebbe very specifically that the Rebbe wanted to

17:14 see criminal justice reform, prison reform, wants prison to be less of a lock a person away-- lock, lock a person up and throw away the key, and more of a rehabilitation program that makes people better. So I do wanna let you know, I think this is a-- it's a law that passed relatively recently and a little bit quietly, and people don't know that it was entirely or mostly, not entirely, but mostly the efforts of Aleph, specifically at the guidance of the Rebbe, the major criminal justice reform relatively recently passed. So Aleph, uh, combined with an advocacy group from Square, they've been lobbying for criminal justice reform since the '90s, uh, trying to get prisons, trying to get prisons to be more progressive in the way that the Rebbe is describing. That they want prisons to be more rehabilitative and less punishment. So they've been pushing for this since the '90s, and it hadn't made a whole lot of progress. In two thousand and eighteen, it finally went through, and, uh, I, I didn't even notice that. I, I went back to look to see if this has ever happened. I didn't realize that we were, we were materially involved. So in twenty eighteen, Senate approved the First Step Act. Are you familiar with the First Step Act? I, I read about it today. So the First Step Act had an enormous majority when it got approved, eighty-seven votes to twelve, and it made it out of the House three hundred and fifty-eight to thirty-six. So

18:16 we're talking enormous bipartisan majorities, and it was signed into law by then President Trump, who was encouraged by Jared Kushner, whose father had been to prison because, you know, Trump was-- Trump ran on the platform that he was gonna be tough on criminal, on, on, on, on criminal justice. So people didn't think it would pass under Trump, but, uh, Jared Kushner helped push it through. So it was just the right situation at the right time. The people pushing this were Aleph. And what does this bill do? This first, uh, what is it called? The First Step Act. It expanded early transfer to home confinement, so it lets people leave ja-- leave jail early as long as-- um, and go into house arrest, uh, if they agree to participate in job training. It, uh, it advocated for more, um, it, it, I guess it assigned money from, uh, more re-entry programming, uh, to help people get back into society and reduce recidivism, which is when you go back to prison, which happens unfortunately too much. It modified a bunch of mandatory sentencing laws so that some people who did relatively minor crimes, the judge will be allowed to use some discretion to try to give them shorter sentences. It also ensured that people who are in prison stay closer to their families and made a law that passed that they have to be with-- they have to be placed within five hundred miles of their homes, allowing family to visit them so they can remain connected

19:15 with their families. So this was pushed through largely by Aleph and almost entirely, I mean, ask Rabbi Lipskier, he'll tell you, that Aleph pushed this through because the Rebbe called for it so often, and Aleph had been pushing for this for years, and it finally passed. So we do actually have a law on the books now that is, uh, that it would not be, it would not be at all a, a stretch to say come from this sicha and from this letter, the Rebbe's dream that he began molding in the '70s and then spelled out very clearly in the '80s finally came to fruition in a pretty big way in twenty eighteen. I'm sure there's still more work to do to fulfill the Rebbe's mission, mission-- fulfill the Rebbe's vision of prison being a place that fixes people, doesn't just hurt people, but, uh, but we're getting there. And it seems to me that a lot of the most recent progress in this area has been entirely from shluchim of the Rebbe, or largely from shluchim of the Rebbe pushing the Rebbe's vision. Okay, that's it.