Category Archives: Crime

In Joseph Telushkin’s masterful biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, he cites an incident in which the Rebbe gives advice to a young woman going through a difficult time in her life when she feels no one understands her emotional pain. He counsels her with an anecdote about motherhood: “When you will grow up and marry and, God willing, have a child, the nature of things are that in the first year…a child begins to teethe and teething is a painful process and the child cries as a result. And the mother feels the pain as if it were her own.” The Rebbe then tells her that this is the way he feels her pain, and that comment enters the girl’s mind and heart.

When we speak about fully identifying with the pain of others, the mother’s love for the child is paradigmatic. This is evident in the case of three mothers who experience crises with their children in the emotionally tense drama Frozen River.

The setting is upstate New York, near the Mohawk Reservation and the Canadian border. Ray Eddy works in a discount store struggling to raise two sons after her husband, a gambling addict, has absconded with all of her savings. In her search for him, she meets Lila Littlewolf, a Mohawk indian who works in a bingo parlor. Although initially mistrustful of each other, they eventually forge an alliance because of their common need for money to provide for their children. Together they transport illegal immigrants over the border from Canada into the United States, crossing the frozen St. Lawrence River, a very dangerous trip that brings them the sizable sum of $1200 per crossing.

On one of their forays to bring illegals into the States, they transport a Pakistani couple who insist on bringing a package with them in the trunk of the car. Unbeknownst to them, Ray leaves the package behind, fearful that it might contain explosives. Once at their destination, they learn that the package contained the baby of the Pakistani woman, who is distraught at losing her child. Ray and Lila do not hesitate trying to recover the baby even though it is pitch black and cold. Ray and Lila are both mothers, and they need no convincing to retrace their route and attempt to locate the baby. Thankfully, the baby is still alive and they happily return it to its mother.

The experience unnerves Ray and Lila, but economic necessity drives them to continue making illegal runs, risking discovery and incarceration by the authorities. Their motivation: to create a better situation for their respective children. A mother’s unconditional love trumps everything.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, one of the great Torah sages of the twentieth century, poetically describes motherhood: “The nine months of pregnancy, with all its attendant biological and psychological changes, the birth of the child with pain and suffering, the nursing of the baby and, later, the caretaking of and attending to the youngster–all form part of the motherhood experience.” For the mother “the image of the baby, the memory of an infant held in her arms, the picture of herself playing, laughing, embracing, nursing, cleaning, and so forth, never vanishes. She always looks upon her child as upon a baby who needs her help and company, and whom she has to protect and shield.” Rabbi Soloveitchik continues: “The mother can never forget the biological fact that her child was once a part of her, that she gave him her blood and that she brought him into the world with suffering and pain. When she says ‘my baby,’ she means to say: Once we were one body. I gave you life.”

In Jewish tradition, God is sometimes referred to by a feminine descriptive, Shechina, to accentuate the similarity of God’s love to a mother’s love. It is this kind of profound sensibility that animates Ray, Lila, and the Pakistani woman, the mothers in Frozen River. It is a film that reminds us of the overwhelming power of motherly love and how it inevitably asserts itself in the midst of crisis.

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A recent newspaper reported that a prominent publisher of maps deleted Israel from maps sold to schools in some middle-eastern countries. Indirectly, schools who use the maps teach that Israel does not exist, and that Jews are usurpers of the land with no legitimate claims. It was another reminder that children can be educated to hate. Sadly, if you want to demonize Jews, there are unlimited ways to do this; the textbooks in many Arab schools and the Arab media promote a vision of the Jew that is easy to detest. I thought of this as I watched a scene in Mississippi Burning, a powerful film about racial tensions in the South, which focuses on the killing of three civil rights workers in the 1960s. In one scene, a Ku Klux Klan leader brands Negroes, Jews, and Catholics as un-American and as minorities who are destroying the fabric of American life and its morality as well. The camera pans on faces of adults and children who are listening attentively to his speech. They are innocent faces, but they are being taught to hate.

The story opens in 1964, when three civil rights workers are killed. At first it is a missing persons case, but the FBI sends two agents, Rupert Anderson, played by Gene Hackman, and Alan Ward, played by Willem Dafoe, to Jessup County, Mississippi, to investigate the details of their disappearance. The townspeople are reluctant to talk to them and getting the truth becomes difficult. A culture of hate is ingrained in the community. Moreover, the more the FBI invests its manpower and time to solve the mystery, the more dangerous life becomes for the community’s black residents.

Finally, the agents get information that leads them to the location of the bodies, and Anderson, using unorthodox methods, is able to ferret out who murdered them. The tense dynamic between Anderson, who is willing to break the law to get necessary information, and Ward, who wants to do things by the book, reveals the difficulty of ascertaining truth in a world where tradition trumps objective truth.

Judaism teaches that all men are created in God’s image and possess infinite value. Therefore, everyone deserves respect regardless of color or creed. It is noteworthy that in the Bible Jews are instructed not to hate the Egyptians, even though it was the Egyptians who enslaved them. The commentators point out that the Egyptians initially provided a place of refuge for the Jews during a time of severe famine. Moreover, it was the daughter of Pharaoh who saved Moses. The commandment not to hate the Egyptian essentially tells us not to carry past animosity with us. To be a free man, you have to let go of hate and not allow it to dominate who you are today.

It is instructive to note that when Miriam, Moses’s sister, criticized Moses for marrying a Cushite woman, a woman with dark skin, she was punished with leprosy. Furthermore, the Song of Songs, written by King Solomon, states “ I am black but beautiful.” A different color does not connote inferiority.

Mississippi Burning on one level is a superb crime thriller, in which we follow the dogged pursuit of the law towards apprehending the murderers of three innocent young men, whose only crime was to work for the civil rights and liberties of all Americans. On another level, it is a cautionary tale about what happens when people blindly accept narratives of hate about others and make them the operative principles for managing relationships with those who are different from them.

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Parenting is complicated, especially when it comes to divorce. Many years ago, a friend who went through a stressful divorce, described the toll it took on the relationship between him and his children. His wife, in order to strengthen her own parental identity, created an environment in which the kids had to take sides. His wife manipulated the situation by bad mouthing her husband and limiting his contact with the kids. Eventually, the kids rejected their father in spite of the children’s natural instinct to be loved by both parents.

The professionals tell us that this is the worst outcome of divorce. They urge parents to keep their personal agenda away from the children as much as possible because kids need to maintain healthy and solid relationships with both parents. It was tragic to witness my friend being demonized in the eyes of his kids.

That was not the end of the story. It has been documented that as a result of parental alienation, kids often develop low self-esteem, depression, distrust people, and sometimes fall into substance abuse. Self-hatred also may result because the child may feel unloved by the alienated parent. All these consequences occurred in the children of my friend. Overall, it was a sad and deeply troubling narrative.

City by the Sea, a crime drama, tells the story of Joey LaMarca, a policeman’s son, who is the victim of parent alienation. His father and mother split acrimoniously and Joey’s descent into the world of drugs was part of the fallout. In a drug deal gone bad, Joey without premeditation kills a drug dealer. This sets in motion two parallel forces searching for Joey: the police who see Joey as a prime suspect, and the partner of the dead drug dealer who wants to kill Joey to preserve the invincible aura surrounding his drug operation.

Vincent, Joey’s dad, is conflicted. He has been out of Joey’s life for years. On the one hand, he wants to help him. On the other, he feels duty bound as a law enforcement officer to treat his son as he would treat any other offender. Things come to a boil when Spyder, the drug dealer who is looking for Joey, murders Vincent’s partner. Joey calls his father to tell him that he did not kill the policeman, and Vincent believes him. This creates the foundation of a new relationship between father and son, who for the first time express their affection one another in a direct way, without interference from outsiders.

In Jewish tradition the father-son dialogue is founded on mutual trust and a belief in the essential goodness of the other. In the Ethics of the Fathers, our Sages point out the kindness of the Creator not only in creating man, but in letting man know that he is a “child of God.” When one feels that he is God’s child, it is an emotional game-changer. When Vincent finally expresses his belief in Joey’s innocence, this sets the stage for reconciliation and love.

In Judaism, the transference of wisdom from one generation to the next does not occur through the mere reading of holy text. Rather, it is personal. It is embedded in the conversations between father and son that are steeped in morality and love. In City by theSea, Vincent LaMarca finally understands that his relationship with his son can be saved only when he communicates to him from the heart, when he freely expresses his parenting mistakes, and embarks on a course of lifetime connection with his son.

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A story to share about my father. When I was 12 years old, I attended a religious camp in the Catskill Mountains in New York. On visiting day, my parents came up to see me. It was the first time I went to a sleepaway camp and my parents and I were looking forward to the meeting. During the visit, a rabbi approached my father and asked him to travel over two hours to pick up Rabbi Aharon Kotler, the founder of the esteemed Lakewood Yeshiva who would come to the camp to address the campers. My father readily accepted the mission; but when he arrived at the destination, he was told that someone else had picked up the rabbi. This was way before cell phones so there was no way to contact my father to cancel the mission. I remember distinctly that my father did not utter one word of complaint. He just did what he felt was right and did not complain when things did not go as planned. His response implicitly taught me that when given a task, your job is to do it with the realization that you are not in control of the outcome. Only God is. Jewish law reflects this approach when it tells us that we receive a reward for traveling to synagogue, even if we discover when we arrive there that there is no quorum for communal prayer.

Another story. My father, after many years of driving used cars, finally bought a new car. Soon after the purchase, I borrowed it and drove carelessly down a street where a garbage truck was making a stop. Instead of waiting patiently for the truck to move, I accelerated and scraped the side of the car, ruining the exterior. When I returned home, my dad simply asked me if I was okay. There was not a word of criticism about my thoughtless driving. I felt guilty for what I had done and incredibly stupid, but I realized that my father trusted me to grasp the folly of my foolish behavior without any reminder from him. I learned from him that sometimes you can learn more from what a parent does not say than from what he says.

All these recollections are a preamble to the subject matter of A Perfect World, a film in which the nature of fatherhood is explored. It is a story about two sons who see the world differently because neither has a father to teach him how to be successful in life.

The narrative unfolds in Texas in 1963 when two convicts, Butch Haynes and Jerry Pugh, escape from a state penitentiary and kidnap eight-year old Phillip Perry to use as a hostage against pursuing police. During the course of their flight, Butch, who himself was an abused child, becomes a protector of Phillip and relates to him as a father, offering insights and life lessons that forge a friendship between the two. Butch becomes the surrogate father that Phillip never had.

On the run with Butch, Phillip, only eight years old, experiences an independence that is exhilarating and frightening at the same time. He shoplifts a Casper the Friendly Ghost costume, yet feels incredibly guilty for breaking the moral code that he has learned from his mother. In the course of their picaresque journey, Phillip confronts moral ambiguities for the first time, and begins to make moral choices.

What does being a father mean? As a father myself, I know it means more than a biological connection. It implies a teaching task as well. The Bible states this clearly when it says “You shall teach your children.” Fatherhood means more than paying the bills for your child. It also means guiding your children, teaching them to make wise decisions so they can navigate life successfully. A Perfect World reminds us of the profound influence of fathers on children, who mentor by example as well as by explicit instruction.

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