In a Brooklyn courtroom, a man, whom I will call Mr. J, stands waiting for his sentence. The judge sits in her robes under large gold letters spelling, “IN GOD WE TRUST.” The prosecution tells the judge that there is a woman in the room who has something to say. The judge takes a sip from her Stanley cup and nods.
Mr. J had been found guilty of murdering the father of the woman’s children. She is shaking and reading from a piece of paper. The woman says, “My children understandably do not want to be here today.” And she goes on to say that what Mr. J did was really bad and that her daughter will graduate high school without her father in the audience. She says she feels sorry for Mr. J because he has lost many people too. She says she knows that Mr. J’s brother was murdered on the same block that Mr. J killed the father of her children. She says that even if Mr. J spends the rest of his life in prison, the dead man will not come back to life. She says that even if Mr. J dies in prison, her children will not see their father on Christmas. She says that if Mr. J dies in prison, he will not have a chance to do better. She says, “I am not crying because this is hard for me. I am crying because I miss him. And because I feel sorry for you. Because I want you to have a second chance.”
She says, “In the name of the Lord, I forgive you.”
I was not raised religious. I was born in the twenty-first century to two atheists with Hindu and Buddhist tendencies who believed in science. I was raised with basic concepts like reincarnation, material transience, the immortality of the soul, but nobody in my family was a believer, and they certainly did not belong to any sort of congregation. I was taught to feel skeptical about institutional religion—to quietly, politely, distrust people of faith. If I did not look down on them, I regarded them with suspicion.
But I realize, in this courtroom, it is not the woman I am skeptical of but the gilded letters above the judge. IN GOD WE TRUST. In God we trust to do what? To judge us? To exile Cain to Nod rather than killing him? To give the same supposed mercy to us? To Mr. J?
It feels irrelevant to have these words in a courtroom. This is not a divine proceeding. It is earthly. In between sentencings, court officers laugh and flirt and talk about lunch. They shuffle papers. They shuffle people. This is earth. The judge is a little false idol with her Stanley cup, sitting sacrilegious under these words. There is no God in this courtroom. The only authority is her.
In East of Eden, John Steinbeck retells the story of Cain and Abel, which is, of course, the story of the first murder. The proper interpretation of the Genesis story itself forms an important plot point. Early in the novel, Lee, Adam’s Chinese-American servant, friend, and philosophical muse, struggles with interpreting the story. The perplexing thing is this:
The King James version says…“And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” It was the “thou shalt” that struck me, because it was a promise that Cain would conquer sin…Then I got a copy of the American Standard Bible… It says, “Do thou rule over him.” Now this is very different. This is not a promise, it is an order.
So Lee learns Hebrew over the course of two years and provides a new translation: “Thou mayest. Thou mayest rule over sin.” And the Hebrew word he translates is called timshel.
Adam has two sons: Caleb and Aron, and in the end Aron dies, of course. On Adam’s deathbed, Lee implores Adam to forgive Caleb for Aron’s death: “Your son is marked with guilt out of himself—out of himself—almost more than he can bear.… Help him, Adam—help him. Give him his chance. Let him be free. That’s all man has over the beasts.”
Adam speaks his last words, to his son and to the world: “Timshel!” In doing so, he not only forgives Caleb, but blesses him with the choice to be good. Thou mayest. Caleb has believed, all the novel, that he is bad and doomed to darkness—that he is bad deep inside. Adam says “timshel,” as if to tell him that he is not only the person he has been, not only the tragic mistakes he has made. Then Adam sleeps, and the novel is over. I am left with only hope for Caleb. I hope that he chooses to be good. More than anything, I hope he knows that he is not bad.
Mr. J’s attorney stands up to speak of all the tragedy in Mr. J’s life. He says that Mr. J’s brother had been killed, that his father had been killed, that his best friend had been killed. He says that Mr. J has had a hard life, and that violence begets violence. He says that Mr. J has diabetes and if he goes to prison for too long then he will die because there will not be proper care for him—he will die before parole. So please do not give him the maximum sentence. He asks for mercy.
The woman who had spoken of forgiveness and the Lord nods and wipes her tears from where she is sitting in the pews. Mr. J is crying too. The judge gives Mr. J the maximum sentence. He stands up and walks through the door where people in custody come from and go back to. I watch the woman get up from the pew. She is crying, but she is not shaking anymore.
25 years to life is cruel. It may be the law, but it is cruel, and I don’t think I need to explain that. I know that Mr. J killed a man. The woman knew it too. But according to my editor for this piece, it is not obvious that the judge’s decision was “wrong.” He asked me, “What if Mr. J kills somebody else?” The judge made a decision to make sure that Mr. J never hurt a free person again. The judge made a decision to preserve human life, to say that human life is valuable and so Mr. J should be taken away. Mr. J had killed a man. He had hurt other people before. His rap sheet was long.
But I would like to return to Lee, who presents Caleb to Adam on his deathbed: “Here is your son—Caleb—your only son. Look at him, Adam!… I don’t know how long you will live, Adam. Maybe a long time. Maybe an hour. But your son will live.” Mr. J will live. The dead man is dead, but Mr. J will live, and if he is not forgiven, he will live a life of suffering.
Mr. J’s life is precious, and the courtroom does not care. But the woman from the pews cares. She looked at Mr. J, and she cared, and she blessed him, and she offered something that the judge could never give. How cruel, that our systems of judgement have mechanisms for punishment and none for grace. That a grieving woman arrives in a courtroom of strangers and the man who took the life of someone she loved in order to offer what apparently only she could offer. Kindness. Mercy. Forgiveness. A blessing to say that you are not your worst mistake. To say timshel, choose better (I forgive you). And how cruel that the judge can hear all that and watch Mr. J leave the room.
I am not well versed in the commonplace occurrences of criminal courts, but from what I understand, what this woman did was very rare. I can only imagine the difficulty of what she did—the strength it took to defy the wishes of her children, and to look Mr. J in his face, and to forgive him, and to mean it. But I do not want to call it extraordinary. I would like to say that this action seems transcendent only in the context of the courtroom, which exists for judgement and punishment, and rarely for anything else.
There is no forgiveness in a legal proceeding—not from the law, not from the judge. Even if Mr. J received a shorter sentence and completed it, he would be marked. He would struggle to find employment, to find housing, to gain custody of his children, to vote, to be treated fairly under the law, by society, by people like you and me. So this woman seemed extraordinary to bring humanity into the Brooklyn Supreme Court. But it should not be extraordinary to see a man as more than his worst mistake, and to want him to be good.
I am not sure how she forgave him. She said, “In the name of the Lord, I forgive you.” Maybe she learned it from Jesus Christ. Maybe she learned it from having children. Maybe she learned it from her own grief, because she knew how life can hurt. Maybe she looked at Mr. J’s face and saw that he needed to be forgiven—the way Adam looked at his son and knew that forgiveness is something human beings need. And she knew that the judge would not tell him she forgives him, that God wouldn’t, that his brother couldn’t, nor his father, nor his best friend, and so she knew her responsibility as a human being to another.
She walked out of the courtroom still crying, no longer shaking. She believed in God. I think she believed that God can forgive, but not on Earth. She asked for the judge’s mercy, but it was too late, and it did not matter. Mr. J will go to prison. I am sorry for him and for everybody else that deserves to be forgiven instead of marked and exiled. I am sorry that we confine other people to the cruel things they do when they are hurt.
Choice is all we have over the beasts. It is all we have over the indifferent and cruel institutions we have created. We must use that choice to forgive. We must do it for each other. It seems to be all we have.
Image: Caravaggio, Conversion on the Way to Damascus, oil on canvas, circa 1600–01 (Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome)