Authors & Artists

by Rabbi Jill Jacobs

The Passover Haggadah opens with a paradox: “We were slaves in Egypt…now we are free.” “Today we are enslaved; next year may we be free.” We begin our Seder each year by stating the impossible: We are free, yet we remain enslaved. We are free insofar as we have escaped physical bondage. Yet, we are enslaved because we still depend on forced labor for our everyday goods.

Today, slavery still permeates our society. An estimated twenty-one to twenty-seven million people in the world remain in slavery. These slaves harvest our chocolate, sew our clothes, pick our vegetables, and polish our nails. They receive little or no pay, and are prevented from leaving through physical or emotional abuse. Slaves work in every industry and in every country, including the United States.

Our ancestors knew that freedom means not only the absence of physical bondage, but also the liberty to live according to our own values and ethics. That’s why they went straight from slavery to accepting the Torah, with its system of laws aimed a creating a more just world.

Today, we cannot fully live by our ethics and values, because we depend on a supply chain so long and complicated that we rarely know when and where slaves are involved.

Therefore, the celebration of our own freedom must be accompanied by efforts to bring about the liberation of all people. The ancient Haggadah text, like Emma Lazarus many centuries later, insists that until we are all free, none of us are free.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the executive director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, which mobilizes action to protect human rights in America and Israel. Rabbi Jacobs lectures and publishes widely on social justice and human rights. She received her rabbinic ordination and an MA in Talmud from the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she was a Wexner Graduate Fellow. Rabbi Jacobs has been named on The Forward’s list of “50 Influential American Jews” and Newsweek’s list of the 50 Most Influential Rabbis in America.