Weekly Torah Sermonette
A Voice Behind the Walls: How the Weekly Torah Message Began
When COVID shut the doors of every federal, state, and local prison in the country, our rabbis could no longer walk through them. We could not counsel. We could not sit with the men and women inside. We could not simply be present.
Many were released in those early months of the pandemic, sent back into a world that had also shut its doors. Too often, without reentry programs to guide them, without their dignity restored, without the resources to rebuild a life, they found their way back inside. The numbers still bear this out today: nationally, about 44% of people released from state prison return within their very first year of freedom, and roughly eight in ten are arrested again within a decade of release. There is real progress to report as well — the three-year reincarceration rate has fallen from about 35% in 2008 to roughly 27–28% in the most recent national data, in the states that have invested in reentry support. But too many still walk out to nothing waiting for them.
And even now, years after the lockdowns lifted, rabbis still are not going back in. Volunteers are still not permitted through the gates of most facilities. There is no one to sit with them, to listen, to help carry the daily struggle of incarcerated life.
It was in that vacuum that the institutions came to us with a request: could we record a message — a timely, weekly message — that could be broadcast on the screens already inside nearly every facility in the country? Most institutions allow inmates access to television, and many now dedicate a channel to religious programming. If we could record something for the Jewish men and women inside, they told us, they would air it.
That is how the weekly Torah message began.
What started as a single recording for a single request has grown into a program now used in nearly every state in the country. Chaplaincy departments and religious programming coordinators download it and place it wherever their population can reach it — on the shared televisions, on the Shabbat and holiday programming channels, and increasingly on the personal tablets that many incarcerated men and women now carry. Of the roughly 1.9 million people held in correctional facilities across the United States today, we cannot know exactly how many are Jewish — but we know that for some of them, this message may be the only Jewish voice reaching them all week.
Our small recording studio on the third floor is now one of the busiest rooms in the building. Every week, a few minutes of words — words of hope, words of warmth, words of Torah — go out from that room into some of the darkest and most isolated places in the country. It is a small thing to record a message. It has become, we have learned, an essential lifeline.
By the Numbers
- Roughly 1.9 million people are currently held in prisons and jails across the United States.
- About 44% of people released from state prison are back inside within their first year of freedom.
- Roughly 82% of state prisoners are arrested again at some point within 10 years of release.
- The 3-year reincarceration rate has dropped from about 35% (2008) to roughly 27–28% today — progress tied directly to reentry investment.
Sources: Bureau of Justice Statistics; Council on Criminal Justice, National Recidivism Report (2026).