The Body Is A Wick

Zalman’s casquette pinched at his temples, too snug against his skull. He sat wedged between six other young men in the van en route to Gulf Pines Correctional Facility. His only reference points for prison came from movies—none of which did much to calm his nerves. The van’s heater, blasting at full force, only made things worse. His beard itched, and his shirt clung to his back, damp and sticky. Since merging onto the freeway, Menachem hadn’t so much as tapped the brake. Loud music crackled from the van’s tinny speakers, competing with the desperate roar of the engine. Zalman tried to catch some sleep before they arrived, but between the blaring noise and being wedged between the door and a snoring Yankel, he soon gave up.

In the prison’s expansive parking lot, the yeshiva students spilled out of the van, stretching stiff limbs. Menachem headed to the trunk to retrieve the large box of donuts, their sweet scent having taunted the group throughout the hour-long ride from the yeshiva. Zalman carried a small gold-leaf menorah and a plastic bag filled with fifty colourful wax candles—staples he kept on hand throughout Chanukah, ready to give to any Jew who might need them, so they too could fulfil the mitzvah of lighting the menorah.

As the group of jacket-clad, menorah-toting yeshiva students passed through the prison’s administrative entrance, Zalman found himself wondering: Were these the same doors new inmates walked through on their first day? He pictured himself entering not as a visitor, but as a prisoner. What kind of crime would have brought him here? White-collar fraud? Theft? Murder?

His eyes drifted back to the van—a battered old thing, but free. He imagined the weight of seeing the outside world for the last time in years, maybe decades. Would he take one final, lingering look? Or turn away quickly, like ripping off a Band-Aid?

The thought made his heart pound. With effort, he steadied himself and remembered the real reason he was here. This was a mission—an important one. There was no time to get lost in idle fantasy.

A blast of warm air hit Zalman as the artificial heat of the waiting room cut through the leftover sweat from the van ride. The secretary sat behind a thick pane of glass; her large frame squeezed into a swivel chair. Zalman figured she must’ve found them amusing: naïve, baby-faced, and obviously-terrified-but-trying-not-to-show-it. She handed over guest passes strung on lanyards and pressed a panic button into Menachem’s hand.

To her left sat half a cup of Earl Grey and a partially completed crossword puzzle, flanked by three precisely arranged, freshly sharpened pencils. She spoke with a slow, Southern drawl, peering over the top of her glasses at Menachem.

“Hold this button if y’all need anything, and a guard’ll come. Might have to press it twice—it acts up sometimes. But don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

Zalman glanced at Menachem—his ample belly and double chin quivering slightly as he nodded—and felt a pang of doubt. Why is Menachem the one holding the button? he wondered. Could he even press it fast enough in an emergency? He’d fumble it. Probably drop it. Relax. They wouldn’t send us here if it weren’t safe. Nothing bad’s ever happened. . . right?

The secretary kept talking. “It’ll go off on its own if you shake it too much, so try not to move it around. No dancing or nothing.” She chuckled, a chesty laugh that ended in a rattling cough. The buttons on her blouse strained under the effort.

Ahead of them loomed the steel door that marked the boundary between the waiting area and the bowels of the prison. Zalman stole one last glance at the secretary, who now seemed openly entertained. She buzzed them through and flashed him a wide, cheesy smile.

Once past the first steel door, they entered a small vestibule and waited for the door to lock behind them. A CCTV camera blinked red in the corner. Then came the buzz of the second steel door, and with a low mechanical groan, they stepped inside the prison.

A brightly lit hallway opened before them, its walls painted a washed-out ocean blue that climbed from the floor up to the wide windows overlooking various rooms. Sessions were ending, and inmates began spilling into the corridor, filling the space with noise, movement, and sudden bursts of laughter. They had arrived just in time.

Zalman instantly felt like a quivering lamb dropped into a den of hungry wolves. Through one of the windows, he spotted an inmate lingering beside a pastor, who stood serenely in front of rows of empty plastic chairs, smiling, with his hands resting gently at his waist.

A familiar nervousness crawled back into Zalman’s chest. Shouldn’t a guard be with us? he wondered. Did the secretary forget? Aren’t visitors never supposed to be alone? His eyes scanned the hallway for some sign of official oversight. The only other person not wearing the green tracksuit and sweater was the pastor. Would he protect us if something happened? Unlikely—he looked too thin.

Relax, Zalman told himself again. They can smell it—fear. He focused on his breathing, trying to calm his nerves. He deadened his eyes, trying to project confidence, but second-guessed himself immediately. Is this too forced? Does it look worse now? He shifted again, adjusting his posture to impress as more natural.

The hallway continued to fill. The yeshiva students, huddled close, shuffled forward, looking like a narrow black rivulet snaking its way toward the sea. Zalman kept his eyes lowered but still noticed one inmate ahead—a perfect caricature of a convict. Bald, with a scar cutting through one eyebrow, he stood squarely in the centre of the corridor, chest puffed out, clearly sizing them up—particularly Yankel, the smallest in the group.

Zalman’s gaze lingered a second too long. The inmate noticed. Their eyes locked for a brief, uncertain moment before Zalman, unsure whether it was braver to hold the gaze or drop it, attempted a clumsy mix of both. The tattooed man muttered something to his friend, and the two of them laughed before walking off. Yankel, eyes glued to his shoelaces, remained ignorant of this all.

As the group passed the room where the pastor still stood, two more inmates exited directly in front of Zalman. They walked arm-in-arm, faces made up with bright purple eyeshadow. The shorter of the two glanced over and gave Zalman a playful wink. This time, there was no hesitation. Zalman immediately diverted his eyes and kept them deadlocked on the dull concrete floor.

Finally, they reached the designated room at the end of the corridor allocated to them for an hour. The fluorescent-lit room was more crowded than Zalman had expected, nearly every bright blue plastic chair occupied by inmates the guard had herded in earlier. At the front stood a portable table where Menachem was busy setting up the menorah and arranging the candles: five for the fifth night of Chanukah.

Zalman joined the others in handing out donuts to the salivating inmates. Most of them, Zalman noticed, didn’t look Jewish at all. Some looked like they’d only just that morning learned what Judaism was. Still, he didn’t mind serving as the pretext for bored inmates to leave their dreary cells for an hour, eat donuts, watch candles burn, and listen to songs they didn’t know and wouldn’t understand. He couldn’t blame them.

Then there were those who did appear Jewish, though the kind who had only recently discovered their Jewish heritage. Their yarmulkes perched awkwardly atop their shaven heads.

Once the menorah was ready and the donuts mostly devoured, Yankel began to sing a Chanukah melody in his characteristic nasal tone. A few inmates recognized the tune and joined in. Others clapped politely, tapped their knees, or smiled vaguely. A handful remained perfectly still, gazing ahead—unreadable.

After the third repetition, the singing trailed off. Menachem, eager to keep the program moving, scanned the line of yeshiva students for a willing volunteer to share words of Torah. Most shifted uncomfortably or looked anywhere but at him. Yankel exaggerated a sharp turn to the right, his eyes squinting as if transfixed by something unseen on the wall—suddenly, deeply interested.

They were all used to being called on to share words of Torah—at Shabbat meals or gatherings. It wasn’t eagerness that prepared them, but habit and caution. They all kept a few ideas tucked away: a thought on the weekly portion, some Hasidic interpretation of current events, or an insight tied to the Jewish calendar. They had all been in the uncomfortable position of lacking words when the time came. They had all learned their lesson.

The discomforting, liminal silence of the concrete room and the shifting inmates waiting patiently for the next part of the routine propelled Zalman forward from the pack.

There was no program. Just six young men in oversized jackets, itchy beards, and woollen ritual fringes, hoping to wrap things up fast enough to get back to yeshiva before the leftovers were gone. Supper was usually salvaged scraps from the better-funded Jewish day school—roasted chicken, boiled potatoes. On holidays, there might be corned beef, or even smoked lamb. On those days, yeshiva students woke up hungry before even recalling the date.

Zalman stepped to the front of the room, shifting uneasily on his feet. Now that he was closer, his earlier estimate of how many inmates were actually Jewish dropped by a few notches.

The man in the front row, wearing a yarmulke too small for his tattooed scalp, rested his forearms on his knees and looked up at Zalman with something resembling hope. His attempt at a warm smile twisted his ink-covered face into a kind of grimace. Zalman imagined the tattoos creeping beneath the green tracksuit, coiling down the man’s arms and legs, darkening his feet. The tracksuit sleeves strained over thick muscles that bulged each time he shifted his elbows on his knees.

Zalman cleared his throat, trying to sound more enthusiastic than terrified. “Happy Chanukah.”

This isn’t about me, he reminded himself. They’re souls too—each one yearning to be closer to its Source.

A scattered chorus of “Happy Chanukah” followed.

“There’s a Hasidic teaching,” Zalman began, “that compares the candle we light on Chanukah to the soul.” He shifted slightly to make sure the menorah behind him was clearly visible.

Suddenly the man in the front row called out, “B’ezrat Hashem!” Several others, also wearing yarmulkes, quickly joined in. Zalman paused, caught off guard. Their use of the Hebrew idiom was entirely out of context, and it struck him as both comical and oddly endearing.

B’ezrat Hashem—literally, “with God’s help”—was usually used to express hopeful aspirations, as in “I hope to be married next year, b’ezrat Hashem.” Someone must have said it in their presence before—perhaps a visiting rabbi on an earlier occasion. Zalman pictured that rabbi returning one day, surprised to find his words joyfully parroted by half a dozen yarmulke-wearing inmates in Gulf Pines Correctional Facility, surprised at how lasting an impression his words had made.

“A burning candle consists of a wick and a flame,” Zalman continued. “Sorry—it has a wick and a flame. The flame is weightless, always reaching upward, trying to return to its source. But the wick holds it down, anchoring it. Hasidic teaching compares this to the body and the soul.”

As he spoke, Zalman felt himself beginning to heat up. He regretted not removing his jacket earlier. A verse from Ezekiel flitted through his mind: They shall not gird themselves with anything that causeth sweat.

The blue wool jacket was the nicest piece of clothing he owned: soft silk lining, elegant gold buttons. It had taken effort to find something that looked good without appearing too materialistic. A yeshiva student had to strike a delicate balance—caring for the physical, yes, but not too much. The physical was merely a vessel. And yet, as Hasidism taught, by housing the soul, the physical, too, became holy.

He’d bought the jacket second-hand after an attractive store attendant told him it fit well. That was enough. He purchased it immediately, even though the overly wide shoulder pads made him look like a military general. Then came the discovery: a linen lining. Shatnez—a biblical prohibition. Wool represented the pastoral heritage of the Hebrews; and linen, Egypt’s riverine culture. He’d paid to have the lining removed—a process more costly than the jacket itself. A kosher patch now rested inside the breast pocket as proof of compliance. Sometimes Zalman wished he had never shown the jacket to his rabbi—or better yet, that he’d forgotten the prohibition altogether.

“. . . Because, like the flame of a candle, the Jewish soul, initially a part of Godly Oneness, seeks its Source, yearning to ascend and reunite with its place of origin. . . ”

Zalman faltered. Godly Oneness? What did they know about Godly Oneness? What did he know about Godly Oneness? The words suddenly felt too big in his mouth, too polished, too presumptuous. His eyes flicked toward the other students for reassurance.

Tzvi, his roommate and study partner, stood against the wall with his arms folded, eyes half-closed beneath the brim of his tilted hat, unreadable. Zalman had spent months trying to crack Tzvi’s stoic exterior, but he remained as much a mystery now as the day they’d first met. Zalman was starting to suspect there wasn’t any deep interiority hiding under all that silence—just plain piety. And that made him even harder to relate to.

Beside Tzvi stood Avraham, one of the senior students, visibly relieved not to be the one speaking. His soft, round face looked absurdly out of place in the sterile fluorescence of the metallic prison room. The senior students had already spent years at other yeshivas and now served as mentors—quasi-counsellors—to the younger students.

Avraham was responsible for getting everyone up in the morning, ensuring they were at least on time for morning prayers, if not for the class beforehand on Hasidic teachings. He’d been a poor fit at first. Despite being a senior, his sensitive and tender nature was taken advantage of by the younger students. He found himself unable to do much beyond offer one or two reminders to the sleeping dawdler. Others quickly realized that if they basically ignored him, he would find it too confrontational to press further and simply leave. Recently, however, he had grown bolder—likely encouraged by the rabbis to take a firmer stance—and had started yanking duvets off the protesting sleepers and quickly carrying them out of the room before they even realized what was happening. If a student wanted his blankets back, he’d have to get up and retrieve them from the living room. At that point, Avraham would generally relent, but at least they had gotten out of bed, and he had fulfilled some part of his responsibility.

For a moment, Zalman imagined a tattooed Avraham, slouched on a plastic chair in prison-green, grinning with a gold tooth and mumbling “b’ezrat Hashem.” The image, far too absurd to maintain, vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

“. . . And just as the flame needs the wick to remain in this world,” Zalman continued, “the soul is tethered to the body, distant from its Source. . . ”

A man in the third row shifted in his seat. Thick glasses framed a face that, to Zalman, seemed almost aggressively non-Jewish. The man reached beneath his thigh, retrieved a napkin, and dabbed donut glaze from the corners of his mouth.

Zalman’s discomfort deepened. Could these men—whose very survival depended on their ability to read faces for signs of threat or weakness—see what an impostor he was? What did he truly know about the Source and Oneness? Could they sense his doubts, his temptations, his failures of strength? Could they detect the erotic fantasies that flickered behind his eyes dozens of times a day as he sat, dead-eyed, staring at the Talmud across from Tzvi—whom he ignored—feeling the coarse pull of his body dragging his soul away from its Source, toward longing and temptation? Did they know?

He searched the inmates’ faces for any flicker of recognition—a smirk, a knowing glance, some subtle giveaway that they saw his taintedness. He glanced at his fellow students. Could they tell? Some of them weren’t innocent either—certainly not Yankel, who routinely slept through the class on Hasidic teachings, even after Avraham dragged his duvet away, and still managed to finish morning prayers at the same time as everyone else. Which meant, of course, he skipped them altogether.

And Menachem? Zalman could never say for sure. But once, walking into Menachem’s room to borrow a book, he saw him quickly close something on his phone and acted suspiciously nonchalant as Zalman searched for the book.

But Avraham? Zalman doubted he’d even once thought about the opposite sex since his bar mitzvah, when he’d first become obligated to keep all 613 commandments. He was too pure, too good. Almost unbearably so.

Zalman looked again at Tzvi, whose hat had now slipped further down his forehead, his expression unchanged. The group of yeshiva students still stood like lambs pressed into the corner of a pen—unmoving, uncertain, hoping they wouldn’t be asked to do more than they already had.

“. . . Hasidism teaches that even when the soul appears confined down here, it remains—at its core—completely free.”

Zalman was aware of how this must sound, especially in a room full of inmates. But he’d already gone too far to turn back. In yeshiva, these teachings had felt abstract—lofty, beautiful, distant. Here, surrounded by men in green tracksuits and steel walls, their implications hit differently.

The voice in his head returned: What could I, of all people, say to a group of inmates? That their soul is free? 

He pressed on.

“The soul is never truly bound. It constantly longs to reunite with its Source, even as the body keeps it tethered to the physical world. That’s part of what Chanukah is about—why we light candles: to remind ourselves that the soul’s light can’t be extinguished. The body might be imprisoned, but the soul remains untouched, always connected to God, and always free.”

It was one thing to wax poetic about souls and bodies—but he had explicitly drawn the connection to imprisonment, bringing it into sharp focus. He could have left the parallel unspoken, allowed them to arrive at it themselves. He braced himself for the worst—perhaps a snort of derision, a roll of the eyes: What, imprisonment is merely an abstraction to you? Or maybe something even worse: the tattooed inmate in the front row rising to his feet, face twisted in rage, clenching his fists and then pointing an accusatory finger, calling Zalman an imposter, a joker, a charlatan—naïve, inexperienced, a prepubescent know-it-all drowning in an oversized jacket with shoulder pads far too big.

Instead, a few overly enthusiastic shouts of “b’ezrat Hashem” rose from the front rows, followed by scattered, sincere applause. Zalman smiled sheepishly and slipped back to join the other students as Menachem stepped forward to light the menorah. Everyone rose for the blessings and joined together in singing a few Chanukah songs, Yankel leading the way.

After a few more minutes of clapping and singing, a guard entered and motioned for them to wrap up. The hour was over and dinner was being served downstairs. The inmates slowly filed out of the overly lit room, a few pausing to snatch one last donut from the tray. One of the yarmulke-wearing inmates stopped at the menorah and crossed himself before moving on.

Back at the front desk, the yeshiva students returned their lanyards and panic buttons. The large-bosomed secretary had been replaced by a younger woman with a steaming mug of coffee and a pink smartphone where the crossword puzzle had been.

Outside in the parking lot, they passed a small circle of Christian missionaries, their heads bowed in quiet prayer or shared words of biblical inspiration. Something in Zalman warmed at the sight. Maybe, just maybe, it was true—they were all bearers of light in their own way, bringing messages of redemption and freedom. So what if his words had come from a young yeshiva student who had never kissed a girl, never had a run-in with the law, never lain awake on motel sheets weighed down by temptation or regret, never stood at the cliff between honor and death? Perhaps he offered the only glimmer of spiritual light that some might have been grasping for. Are we not all souls in prison, after all, yearning for redemption?

He glanced at Avraham. In his mind’s eye, he saw him flattened against the cold concrete of a prison floor, surrounded by gold-toothed, tattooed inmates in baggy tracksuits. In the vision, Avraham’s face contorts with pain, surprise, and terror as his mouth opens and closes like a fish gasping for air. In his desperation, Avraham’s eyes look upward toward the ceiling, seeking some sort of target. They find their mark and are instantly transformed, at peace. His mouth stops its gaping and settles into a contented smile for he understands that his soul is, had been, and always would remain free, untethered from the pain of the body and, in truth, never truly separate from its Source, from Divine Goodness.