What It’s Like to Celebrate a Holiday About Freedom—in Prison

A Passover seder in San Quentin is “nice,” but “the concept of liberty, we far from it.”

Scott Keeler/Tampa Bay Times/Zuma

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On a recent Friday evening just north of San Francisco, I sat with more than 60 people at long tables covered with white tablecloths in a barebones chapel room. We were there to celebrate Passover; to read the Haggadah, the holiday’s central story; and to eat the symbolic seder meal meant to represent each part of the journey that Jews took from slavery to freedom. It could have been your typical Passover seder—except for a few things. People poured each other Welch’s grape juice instead of wine, and the only cutlery we were given were plastic forks. That’s because this seder took place in San Quentin State Prison.

Rabbi Paul Shleffar, the Jewish chaplain at the prison, has celebrated Passover with the men inside every year since he started working at San Quentin in 2015. The annual event is a collaboration between San Quentin’s Shleffar and members of a local congregation, Rodef Sholom. This year, they served about 180 holiday meals to the incarcerated men at the service and those on death row and in solitary confinement who couldn’t attend in person. Tune in to my dispatch from the night on this week’s episode of the Bite podcast:

During the two-hour affair, we took turns reading the Haggadah with frequent musical breaks between sections. A band made up of incarcerated men and volunteers played traditional Jewish songs and less conventional numbers like Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” After the service, we dug into food brought in from the nearby Wise Sons deli, a far cry from the usual prison fare.

But people weren’t just there to take advantage of the meal. Lloyd Payne, 29, has been incarcerated since he was 14 and has been practicing Judaism in prison for years. Before San Quentin, he’d never been in a prison that held services or had a rabbi, and he’d never been to a seder. “We got made fun of for being Jewish, and for eating a certain way and practicing a certain life,” he said. This year he could relax a little more and just enjoy the holiday. He has his own read on the Passover allegory: “It’s Egypt always representing ignorance, and you crossin’ over from the ignorance into wisdom, of the darkness to light,” Payne said. “That’s what it’s really about for me—the times that I’ve been ignorant until I come into a new body of knowledge to practice wisdom.”

Payne will finally be released this year on Christmas Day. He’s acutely aware of the themes of freedom and captivity that are front and center during Passover. “To celebrate the holiday is nice,” Payne said. But “the concept of liberty, we far from it. In bondage or out of bondage, we so far off from liberty that I just laugh at it.”

He feels buoyed, though, when volunteers from the outside community come in to spend time with him and the other incarcerated men. “That means more to me than the actual celebration of the holiday,” he said. “When you guys come here, you show us that you actually care. That means more to me.”

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate