Immigration Court (Yom Kippur 5786)

Court Watching

Originally published October 6, 2025

by Shifra Sharlin

“Do you believe in God?”

This was the question that the sad man typed into the translation app on his phone. In reply, my friend Wanda typed into her translation app, “My parents were communists!” I typed, “I’m Jewish. I pray but I am not so sure I believe in god. I think it’s important to be….” and, not sure what that important thing might be, I hesitated before typing, “good.” I handed my phone to him, he read what the app had translated, and handed my phone back.

Then I typed, “Today is the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when even non-religious people go to synagogue, but I wanted to come here.” I handed my phone to him. He read, nodded, and handed it back. The phone being handed back and forth between us was some kind of sacrament, the sacrament of connection in immigration court.

Ten days earlier, on Rosh Hashanah, the new year, my younger daughter had texted her siblings, her father, and me, “I hope this year continues to bring the blessings of connection, as well as courage and patience for all the things that are hard.”

I didn’t need to go to synagogue to hear the prayer I most wanted to hear. The closing lines stay with me, “Our Father, Our King, have compassion on us and answer us although we are without merit. Grant us justice and mercy and redeem us.” And repeat. I hear these words in my head the way I chant them in synagogue: in Hebrew, with longing, and without hope for a beneficent reply.

These words take me back to my 20s, the time in my life when I was taking my older brother, also in his 20s, to his cancer treatments. Every year I watched him absorbed in this very prayer — the same melody and the same words. I used to study the curve of his nose, his heavy eyelids, dark eyelashes, and his neck, marked for radiation. He knew as I knew that we were not going to get the reply we wanted.

This prayer, a petition, follows another one whose words also never leave me. That one lists what might happen to us in the coming year as a list of paired alternatives, beginning with “Who shall live and who shall die.” My brother and I recited that long, relentless list:

“Who will die in old age and who in youth, who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by strife and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in quietude and who will be tormented, who will enjoy tranquility and who will be distressed, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be cast down and who will be exalted.”

We knew that we would not find out how, in the final words of the petitioning prayer, “Repentence, prayer and charity will lessen the severe decree.”

On that Yom Kippur in immigration court, the sad man’s decree was lessened. It was lessened no thanks to the judge who heard his case. She knew as we knew, that her decision would not affect the actions of the armed agents infesting the building. For no discernible reason, the sad man got to walk out of the building.

We rejoiced outside the building where, hours earlier, tears had been streaming down his face. What he had feared had not happened.

And if he had ended up with the worse of the two alternatives, I would have refused to comfort myself with the notion that his severe decree had been mitigated in the ways that not only the religious among us like to suppose: by some pedantic emphasis on the word “lessen” or by an intricate interpretation of justice and of mercy or by exalting the value of what is popularly called “bearing witness.”

I choose nightmares over that kind of comfort any day.

The now happy man took my phone number so that he could text me his thanks later in the day. I gave thanks for the cell phone, the supreme intercessor. Praise its power to intervene between us and ourselves, for connecting us to others.

Cell phones are not allowed in court. Another court watcher who persisted in scrolling through her phone was ejected from the court.

In the court, the judge rules. Common analogies to the courtroom and religious spaces explain the way respondents are the suppliant worshippers, gazing up to the judge to plead their cases for justice. The words of the court are as formulaic as any other liturgy. And the judge claims to be just as ominiscient as the gods of other religions.

The judge knows the answers to her own questions. The respondent soon realizes this. Any deviation is tolerated according to the judge’s temperament. But this is too bad for the judge.

Because I think the judge on this Yom Kippur might want to allow room in her questioning for the sad man to tell her, as he told Wanda and me, “I am not a bad person. I came to this country for the opportunities to help my family.” The photographs he showed us of his mother and sister back in his home country ought to have a place in the whole ritual of the court hearing.

These hearings are as routinized as any religious service — the same questions, the same responses, the same words day in and day out, year in and out.

When the judge asked him whether he had entered the country at an unknown location on an unknown day, if only he would been allowed to break routine, then the court would have been enlivened. Had the court only asked him, he could have told them how he cleaned a school in Harlem at night and served food at Jewish weddings in Brooklyn on Sundays. It would have lessened the severity of the court’s routines if only the court would have listened to the fact that he goes to a school to learn English, that his mother and sister depend on the money he sends them ,and that in the two years he has lived in this country he has found the time to make only one friend.

There’s a reason routine is so often called deadening. It also makes the world a severe place.

The end is the place for redemption. I don’t have redemption, I have memories and every year I relive them. I see my brother’s face and hear his voice in these prayers I love but don’t believe. And now every year, I will see the man who got to walk out of the building, at least on this one day.

This post is dedicated to my brother, Allan Sharlin (1950-1983), his memory is a blessing.