Jewish educator links today’s environmental crises to biblical plagues of Passover, seeks change

With Passover and Earth Day being celebrated on Monday, Eli Greenstein Jacober’s thoughts turn to plagues — both biblical and modern.

The Jewish educator traces a through line from the hail, frogs and locusts that shook Pharaoh’s Egypt nearly 3,500 years ago to the pollution, deforestation and invasive species that harry us today — environmental damage.

It has inspired the “Passover Earth Day Challenge,” an effort to produce 5,000 acts of ecological repair across the country. The challenge, which continues through April 30, when Passover ends, comes from the environmental advocacy nonprofit Repair the World; Mr. Greenstein Jacober, a resident of Baltimore, is the group’s senior director of growth strategy.

“I have not seen frogs jump out of the Nile, or the [river] turn to blood, but I do live in a reality where I see waste in the [Inner] Harbor and Baltimore,” he said, referring to the March 26 collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. A runaway cargo ship crashed into one of the bridge’s supports, sending most of the thoroughfare crashing into the Patapsco River and killing six construction workers.

Mr. Greenstein Jacober said young adults who follow Repair the World are concerned about the environment.

“They live in this world. They’re going to have kids in this world,” he said. “They’re thinking about, ‘What is it that I can do?’”

Repair the World has devised a digital workbook that offers discussion points to be raised during the Passover Seder, the religious meal that commemorates the Jews’ flight from Egypt, as told in the Book of Exodus.

“One of the sorts of modern plagues that we identified is just lack of environmental awareness,” Mr. Greenstein Jacober said. “And so the challenge for that is to have a conversation with your family and friends and sort of understand, ‘What do people think about what’s going on today? Do you think that we need to make changes?’”

And Jewish values support the notion of environmental actions, he added.

“Many of our holiday traditions, Passover included, are based on an agricultural cycle,” he said. “When do you plant the first crops? When do you harvest the crops? When do you stop tilling the field? So built into our calendar is an identity of connection to the earth and connection to the land.”

What’s more, environmentalism also aligns with the biblical teaching of “Bal Taschit,” Hebrew for “thou shalt not destroy,” he said. The principle, expressed in Deuteronomy 20:19-20, supports an “act of service” to combat overconsumption, which he says is an environmental threat.

“We should think about the sustainability in our actions, and I think that is definitely a value that a lot of more modern thinkers try and apply to their work,” Mr. Greenstein Jacober said. “We want to be a positive contributor to the world around us.”