Word Prompt – LIBERTY – Sarah Pachter

“Every American has the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Ironically, according to the 2025 World Happiness Report, the U.S. ranked only 24^th happiest in the world. The lowest we have ever come in at.

What about liberty? Are we truly free?

Perhaps freedom is not political or economic. Maybe real liberty is internal – something no government, culture, or oppressor can ultimately control.

Rabbi Y.Y. Jacobson recently spoke about the Dumbrov community that was murdered on Gimmel Elul during the Holocaust. This was actually my mother-in-law’s family, many of whom perished there. On Erev Shabbat, standing beside a mass grave, the community began singing Kabbalat Shabbat. Someone called out, “They can destroy our bodies but they can’t extinguish our spirit! Let us sing!” Stripped of everything physical, yet spiritually untouched. Their message echoed through history: Our freedom, our liberty cannot be taken from us.

Interestingly, the words on the Liberty Bell were taken from the Torah: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” This refers to Yovel, when land returned to its original owners, slaves were freed, and society reset itself every fifty years.

Think about how radical that is. No powerful person would design a structure of rules preventing their own permanent dominance. But the Torah restricts everyone equally – kings, priests, landowners, husbands, and the wealthy alike.

Who would create such a system? Only G-d.

Liberty is not the ability to do whatever we want. Real liberty is freedom from the illusion that power belongs to us in the first place. It is the recognition that we are all accountable to something infinitely higher than ourselves.