By coincidence, this year as the Jewish High Holidays approached I have been reading "Dead Man Walking," Sister Helen Prejean’s personal witness against the death penalty. Her account of her journey into the lives of death row inmates and their victims’ families is riveting. She quotes philosophers and criminal justice experts, cites statistics and Catholic doctrine to support her arguments for opposing the death penalty. But for me what is most timely and moving is her unrelenting focus on forgiveness, in Hebrew selichot.
