Putting Ourselves into the Shoes of Another as We Tell the Story of Pesach This Year

By Rachel Landsberg, JCAN NYC member

Pesach/Passover is the holiday of storytelling; we are invited to retell the story of yetziat Mitzrayim, the exodus from Egypt, around the seder table. On the one hand, we are telling a very particular story, with fixed details and characters and events. It is a story of what happened to our people and to our ancestors. It is, perhaps, “the” central and defining story that helps us understand ourselves better – who we are and how we have gotten to where we are today.

And, on the other hand, it is the most universal of stories, serving as inspiration to many individuals and communities across the world in the past and up to and including the present.  The story of overcoming oppression and moving towards liberation has been crucial to the human experience throughout time. In addition, the Pesach narrative has much insight to offer us as climate activists, and I invite each of us to bring that identity and lens into our telling of the exodus this Pesach.

Two lines from the Haggadah (the Jewish book used to guide us through the Passover seder) jump out at me this year as a Jewish climate activist.  The first one comes after we recite the Four Questions. The Haggadah tells us:

מִצְוָה עָלֵינוּ לְסַפֵּר בִּיצִיאַת מִצְרָיִם. וְכָל הַמַּרְבֶּה לְסַפֵּר בִּיצִיאַת מִצְרַיִם הֲרֵי זֶה מְשֻׁבָּח.

It is a commandment upon us to tell the story of the exodus from Egypt. And anyone who elaborates on the telling of the story of the exodus from Egypt is praiseworthy.

Not only are we obligated to tell the story of the exodus from Egypt, but we are asked to elaborate, to stretch out, to magnify our telling of the story. Perhaps this elaboration not only suggests quantity - how much time we take to tell the story - but also quality - the way in which we choose to tell the story.  The request to elaborate, perhaps, invites us to delve more deeply into the story and to see how it is relevant and personal to us each year.  What is the story of oppression in our times?  What do we, individually and collectively, need to be freed from this year?  As we change each year, the story changes with us; as the world changes each year, what the world needs from us changes. It is our task, then, on the night of Pesach, to use this story of the past to help us better understand ourselves, our world, the challenges before us, and what action is needed from us today as we continue to work to dismantle oppression. 

Towards the end of the Maggid (“Telling the Story”) section of the Haggadah, we recite:

בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם

In each and every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if they left Egypt.

We are obligated to see ourselves in this story, to imagine that we ourselves have left Egypt. The Haggadah is asking us to embody an experience that we have not actually lived through, to put ourselves into the shoes of another.  To do that, we must step outside of our own selves for just long enough so that we can get a taste of someone else’s experience, we must ask good questions and become good listeners, and we must develop and then employ empathy.  We must identify the challenges, the “Egypt,” of our times and then hold out faith that we can leave that Egypt behind and move into a redemptive future, united.

In that quest to put myself into the shoes of another, I will be bringing many new questions to my seder this year, in addition to the traditional Four Questions, as I attempt to confront the climate crisis and climate injustice.  I have included a list of resources at the end of this piece that I have found that are helping me to consider each of the following questions:

  • What is it like to be a climate refugee with no sense of what the future will bring? 

  • What does it feel like to literally watch the habitat where you live change before your very eyes? 

  • How does environmental racism impact your daily life? 

  • What will help you, as a coal miner worried for your livelihood and your family’s future as we transition off of coal and onto renewables?  

The Haggadah, weaving the personal and the universal together as one, asks us to see our plight as intricately connected to the plight of others and our story as intricately connected to the story of others.  Similarly, as we work to address climate change in the fullest and most liberating of ways, we must listen to the stories in our own communities and across the globe so that we can find solutions that truly ensure a shared and sustainable future for all living things.

This year at our seder, when we break out into song as we recite Hallel upon completing the telling of our story, may we be blessed to not only rejoice at the redemption of the past, but may we also feel the hope of the future world we are working together to create and the redemption yet to come.

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Resources from Rachel related to the questions she raises