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Let My People Go: An Instant Lesson on World Slavery

By Ron Isaacs

Teacher's Guide
Abstract: Grades 6-10
Time: 1 to 1-1/2 hours
Subject: Slavery, Passover

Overview

Slavery was known throughout ancient times. The Torah deals with it as a fact of life, insisting on stressing the humanity of the slave, a person endowed with rights and dignity. Today, slavery continues to be an issue, not only in the United States but in countries around the world. In this lesson, students are provided with a brief history of slavery as well as an opportunity to learn about real-life modern slaves, their plight and ultimate redemption.

The Passover seder celebrates the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. At the seder, the custom is for participants to lean on pillows and recline in their chairs, in the style of free people of leisure. Many seder rituals remind participants of servitude in Egypt. The maror, the bitter herb, represents the bitterness of Jewish servitude in Egypt. Charoset, made of nuts and apples crushed together into a mortarlike substance symbolize the mortar the slaves were required to produce for their Egyptian masters. The seder's basic goal is to teach participants that the Jews once were slaves in Egypt, and that God redeemed them with a mighty hand. Finally, the Jewish people departed from Egypt with the flat bread known as matzah. Since the first Passover, Jews commemorate the holiday by eating matzah, which symbolizes, among other things, that it is better to live in freedom and eat poor food than to remain in slavery and eat lavishly.

As we prepare for Passover seders, we are also reminded in the Haggadah that "in every generation we are commanded to view ourselves as if each one of us was personally brought forth out of Egypt." The purpose of such memory is to remind us of the feeling of being a slave. More than that, however, this command, combined with the rejoinder to "remember the stranger, for we were strangers in Egypt," is a call to action, a call for us to rise up against slavery and tyranny in our own generation. The lesson provides students with action components for a world slavery program.

Goals

  • Students will learn historical facts related to slavery in the world.
  • Students will learn that there is still slavery throughout the world.
  • Student will learn how the holiday of Passover can not only remind us of Israelite slavery 3000 years ago, but also helps us understand that Passover is a call to action to rise up against slavery and tyranny in our own generation.
  • Students will learn about organizations that proactively work to free enslaved people throughout the world.

Procedure

Set Induction

Start by asking students: What is a slave? What does it mean to be enslaved? Are there slaves in the world today? If so, who are they?

Next, have students read the story of The Boy from Sudan. One of the key lines in the story is "I will use my freedom to help to free others." Who might these others include?

Conclude by working out a useful definition of an enslaved person that would be applicable today.

A Brief History of Slavery
  • Have students read the brief history of slavery.
  • Teachers may choose to have their students discuss their reaction to the existence of slavery in the United States, the so-called "home of the free."
Slavery Today
  • Have students read the statistics regarding slavery today.
  • Teachers may choose to discuss selected statistics that are of particular interest to the students.
Passover: Its Real Message
  • Discuss with students how the texts of the Passover Haggadah connect to the slavery of today.
  • Have students brainstorm ideas that could be incorporated into their own seders that would be beneficial to organizations that work to free the enslaved.
  • Thomas Jefferson once proposed that the official seal of the new republic should show a scene of the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea, with the following inscription: "Disobedience to tyrants is obedience to God." Ask students their opinion of Jefferson's proposal.
  • Rabbi Israel Moshowitz once wrote: "Egypt is not only a country, it is a state of mind. The exodus is not only a point in history, but a constantly occurring phenomenon. We all live in Egypts that narrow and confine our lives." Ask students to identify the Egypts against which people must continuously do battle.
Freeing the Enslaved: What Can You Do?

Have students read about and discuss the organizations that work on behalf of world slavery and some of the ideas presented that can be incorporated into the seder to remind people of their obligation to free the enslaved.

Questions to Think About

Have students read and answer selected questions to think about. (It is of special importance for students to identify the many places in the siddur that make reference to the Israelite exodus from Egypt.)

Extra Questions to Talk About
  • A band of 967 Jewish rebels retreated to a desert mountaintop, called Masada, following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D. The Romans built a large assault ramp to the top of the mount. When they arrived at the top, they were met by neither fierce resistance nor meek surrender. On the previous night Eleazar ben Yair had gathered his followers and made a passionate plea that they not allow themselves to become enslaved. Heeding Ben Yair's call, the rebels committed suicide. The only survivors were two women and five children who hid themselves to escape the collective suicide. What is your opinion of the action of the Jewish rebels? What is it about slavery that they found so abhorrent?
  • The Hebrew word "ger" can mean both stranger and convert. What have the two in common? How do you create conditions of just treatment for both of these groups?
  • The story in the Haggadah continues to be told without so much as a single mention of Moses. (His name is cited once, but only within the context of a biblical quotation.) Why do you think that Moses is downplayed in the Haggadah?
  • Why are there so many questions to be asked at the Passover seder? Do you see any connection to slavery?
  • The Passover Haggadah says that all have a personal obligation to feel and think as if we ourselves, in our own person, had come out of Egypt. What do you think this means? Is it possible for modern Jews to feel the misery of the slaves in Egypt?
Other Things You Can Do
  • The signing of the 13th Amendment by Abraham Lincoln took place on Feb. 1, 1865. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude ... shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction." On June 30, 1948, a National Freedom Day Bill was adopted by both houses of Congress. The measure authorized the President of the United States to issue a proclamation designating the first day of February each year as National Freedom Day. This day continues to be a carefully guarded secret with minimal publicity. You may want to use this date each year to encourage your fellow students to become more proactive in the anti slavery movements.
  • Judy Feld Carr, a Canadian, has for the past two decades, championed the cause of the oppressed Syrian Jewish community. Her efforts helped to free three thousand Syrian Jews, and last year the Government of Canada awarded her its highest honor, making her a Member of the Order of Canada for saving Syrian Jewry. Research the life of Judy Carr and make others aware of such incredible freedom heroes.
  • Many products, especially in the clothing industry, are made by countries using slave laborers. Say "no" to products made with forced labor. For more information on this, contact: National Labor Committee, (212) 242-3002.
  • Convince others not to do business with or tour countries that engage in slavery-like practices, such as Mauritania, China, North Korea, Burma, and Sudan.
  • Write letters to your senators, congressmen and other governmental officials, asking them to press the government to work more proactively to eradicate slavery. Remind them that Sudan, the largest African country, continues to suffer from a war whose atrocities include mass torture, murder and slavery. Tens of thousands continue to be enslaved.
  • Highlight those places in the Haggadah that deal with the theme of slavery and freedom. You may also choose to research various customs that families around the world have that help bring the slavery and freedom texts to life.
The Boy from Sudan

One day, 7-year-old Francis Bok was selling eggs and beans at a nearby market for his mother. A troop of militia stormed the market, kidnapped all the women and children, and sold them into slavery. Within days, the boy was herding farm animals hundreds of miles from his village. Francis learned to be quiet and pray to God. He spent the next ten years caring for and sleeping with farm animals. Then one day he asked his master why he had to sleep with the animals. The answer he received was "Because you are an animal, so you have to live with the animals."

At 17 years old Francis escaped and reached sanctuary in Cairo, and then was given asylum in the United States. Today he works as an abolitionist with the American Anti-Slavery Group. "I can't imagine it happened to me," Bok said. "Because of others that have no voice, I will use my freedom to help to free others." Since arriving in the United States in 1999, Bok has spoken to many schoolchildren, as well as before Congress.

Slavery: A Brief History

Jewish Slavery

From the time of Abraham, the Hebrew patriarchs had slaves or were slaves themselves. Joseph, Abraham's great-grandson, was sold to the Ishmaelites, who in turn sold him to the captain of the Egyptian's pharaoh's bodyguard. After Joseph's death, the Jews were taken into captivity and placed in bondage by the Egyptians.

But the Jews were not the only slaves in Egypt. Egyptian criminals were sometimes punished by enslavement, and men could be enslaved for debts they could not pay in any other way. Poor men could sell themselves and their children. Besides, Egypt was a center of the ancient slave trade and imported slaves from the neighboring countries of Ethiopia, Knobby and Assyria.

After their escape from Egypt, the Hebrews maintained slavery among themselves. It was regulated by the laws of the Torah as a basic part of their economy and culture. It was clear that in a world in which slavery was universally practiced that the Torah hedged it with protective restrictions. Under the laws of the Torah a slave was considered a member of the master's household and could even become a member of the master's family! If the slave was a Hebrew, he could be held in bondage for only six years, after which the master was bound by law to let him go free. The freed slave was never sent into the world empty-handed. The former master gave him sheep from his flock, and grain and wine for the journey. Biblical law (Deuteronomy 23:16-17) also states that "You shall not return a runaway slave to his master. Let him stay with you anywhere he chooses in any one of your settlements, whatever suits him best. You shall not wrong him." If a master put a slave to death, the master was himself subject to execution (Exodus 21:20). A master who knocked out a slave's tooth or eye was obliged to free him (Exodus 21:26).

Jewish law as it developed in the later law codes always attempted to ameliorate the lot of the slaves. In the eleventh century, Maimonides wrote the following in his Mishneh Torah: Laws of Slavery (9:8): "It is allowed to work the slave hard, but while this is the law, ethics and prudence suggest that a master should be just and merciful, not impose too heavy a burden on his slave, and he should give him of all his own food and drink. Slaves may not be maltreated or offended. The law destined them for service, not for humiliation."

American Slavery

The slave trade to the English settlements in the New World began in 1619 when several Africans were landed by a Dutch trader and sold in Jamestown, Virginia. In 1715 there were about 23,000 slaves in Virginia and equal numbers in Maryland and the Carolinas. In New England and among thoughtful people elsewhere antislavery feeling had been growing since before the American Revolution. Many of the founders of the United States were against it. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Patrick Henry did not like slavery. Although he held slaves himself, George Washington said that one of his first wishes was to see slavery wiped out, and he caused some of the blacks who fought in the Revolutionary War to be freed. Vermont in 1777 became the first state to abolish slavery altogether. Massachusetts followed in 1783. The importation of slaves to the United States after 1808 was forbidden by the Constitution.

By the time the United States had settled down after the Revolution, cotton, tobacco, sugarcane and rice were the crops on which the South's way of life was based. Many southerners believed that these crops could not be produced without slave labor. It has been estimated that by the beginning of the 19th century there were a million and a half slaves working the fields in the U.S. Thousands more served as cooks, maids, valets and coachmen. The field hands lived the hardest lives and were the most cruelly treated.

In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a black slave who had been brought by his master to a free state could be forcibly returned to slavery in the south. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the rebel states. When the war ended in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was signed, and the abolition of slavery in America was complete.

Slavery Today

Slavery is forced labor for no pay under the threat of violence. This is a reality for many people enslaved around the world. According to the London-based Anti-Slavery International (ASI), the world's oldest human rights organization, there are at least 27 million people in bondage. Here are a few other astounding statistics:

  • UNICEF estimates that 200,000 children from West and Central Africa are sold into slavery each year.
  • Between 1991 and 1997, 15,000 children were sold into slavery in Cambodia.
  • Almost 200,000 Nepali girls (many under the age of 14) are sexual slaves in India.
  • The C.I.A. estimates that over 50,000 people are brought into the United States each year as slaves.
  • The Thai government reports that 60,000 Thai children have been sold into sex slavery.
  • Asian women are sold to North American brothels for $16,000 each.

Contemporary forms of bondage include forced labor, child labor, sex slavery, debt bondage (i.e., working off a loan) and servile marriage.

Passover: Its Real Message

Jewish tradition requires that on the eve of Passover (during the seder meal) we reexperience the liberation from Egypt. We are to remember how our family suffered as slaves and are to feel the exhilaration of freedom. Each year we return to Egypt in order to be freed. We experience slavery by eating bitter herbs, dipping greens in salt water, and eating matzah, the bread of affliction. We read from the Haggadah, which tells the story of the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery.

The Torah itself constantly warns us to take care of the poor widow, orphan and stranger. We are told to leave behind the fallen gleanings of the field for them, to always ensure that they receive equal justice. Why? "Because you were slaves in Egypt" (Deuteronomy 24:22).

We are commanded: "You shall not oppress the stranger for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourself been strangers in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 23:9). And additionally, "When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens. You shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I the Eternal am your God" (Leviticus 19:33-34). It has often been noted that the historic Jewish involvement in human rights and civil rights movement-even in those societies where Jews already have had equal rights-is an outgrowth of this three-thousand-year-old reminder from the Torah, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."

Perhaps the essence of the Passover seder is summed up in this verse from the Haggadah after the dayenu song: "In every generation one must look upon himself as if he personally had come out from Egypt." As the Bible says, "And you shall tell your son on that day, saying, it is because of that which the Eternal did to me when I went forth from Egypt. For it was not alone our ancestors whom the Holy One redeemed. God redeemed us too, with them as it is said: 'God brought us out from there that God might lead us to and give us the land which he pledged to our ancestors.'"

Today, slavery is almost universally outlawed. However, this prohibition is often honored more in the breach than in the observance. There are many societies in which human beings are in effect property of that society. When such a person succeeds in fleeing his or her captivity Torah law mandates that we give him or her political asylum. But this is not enough. We must not wait for people to flee captivity. The Book of Leviticus 19:16 says: "You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor."

Freeing the Enslaved: What Can You Do?

Each year the festival of Passover comes to remind us of the centuries of slavery in which the Israelites found themselves and our obligation as Jews today to fight for the freedom of all who are still enslaved today throughout the world. Following are some ideas and suggestions to get you started.

  • Both the Reform and Conservative Branches of Judaism have social action committees devoted to issues of human rights. The Reform organization is called the Religious Action Center, an organization that pursues social justice and religious liberty. Its address is 2027 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, DC 20036. The phone number is (202) 387-2800. You may also wish to contact the Social Action Committee of the Rabbinical Assembly of America. Its address is 3080 Broadway, New York, New York, 10027.
  • The American Anti-Slavery Group, a human rights group founded in 1993, is dedicated to building awareness of contemporary slavery and to re-awaken the American abolitionist movement. You may visit its very informative website by logging on to iAbolish.org, and once there, you may sign up with the Freedom Action Network (FAN). This network unites abolitionist activists from around the world and amplifies the call for action against contemporary slavery.
Changing Your Seder

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism distributed the following prayer to draw attention to the issue of slavery in Sudan and Mauritania:

On this holiday when we are commanded to relive the bitter experience of slavery, place a fourth matzah with the traditional three and read this prayer:

(Holding the Fourth Matzah) "We raise this fourth matzah to remind ourselves that slavery still exists, that people are still being bought and sold as property, that the Divine image within them is yet being denied. We make room at our seder table and in our hearts for those in southern Sudan and in Mauritania who are now where we have been. We have known such treatment in our own history. Like the women and children enslaved in Sudan today, we have suffered while others stood by and pretended not to see, not to know. We have eaten the bitter herb; we have been taken from our families and brutalized. We have experienced the horror of being forcibly converted. In the end, we have come to know in our very being that none can be free until all are free. And so we commit and recommit ourselves to work for the freedom of these people. May the taste of this 'bread of affliction' remain in our mouths until they can eat in peace and security. Knowing that all people are Yours, O God, we will urge our government and all governments to do as You once commanded Pharaoh on our behalf: 'Shelah et Ami! Let My People Go!'"

Some families choose to fill Elijah's cup of redemption during the seder by passing it around the table for everyone to pour his or her wine into it, thus symbolically stating that all join together to bring about the final redemption.

Among some North African Jews the seder begins with each person taking a staff in his hand, holding a matzah on his shoulder and a pack on his back, and walking in a circle around the seder table, dramatically reliving the walk out of Egypt.

At some point in the seder, perhaps after the meal when people have sat and eaten for a considerable time, have everyone stand, stretch their arms and legs and recite the blessing for the liberation of prisoners:

Blessed are You...Who releases those bound up.

Barukh Attah Adonai, Eloheinu Melekh ha-Olam Mateer Asureem

Blessed are You...Who made me free.

Barukh Attah Adonai, Eloheinu Melekh ha-Olam she-Asanee Ben/Bat Horee